■.•"(;■  -  . 


JANE  AISAMS  i 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


THE    LONG   ROAD    OF  WOMAN'S 
MEMORY 


_^T1^^ 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NBW  YORK   •    BOSTON   -    CHICAGO   •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA   •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON   •    BOMBAY   •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE  LONG  ROAD  OF 
WOMAN'S  MEMORY 


BY 


JANE   ADDAMS 

Author  of  "Twenty  Years  at  Hull  House" 

"The  Spirit  of  Youth  and  the 

City  Streets,"  Etc. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 
1916 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1916, 
Bv  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.    Published  October,  1916. 


J.  S.  Cnshing  Co.  —  Berwick  <fc  Smith  Co. 
Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


4 


^ 


'^ 

<^\  ^  TO    MY    DEAR    FRIEND 

MARY  H.  WILMARTH 

WHOSE    MEMORY    STORED    WITH     THE     BEST     IN     LITERATURE 

AND   WHOSE   FINE  PUBLIC  SPIRIT  ARE   DAILY  PLACED 

AT  THE   SERVICE  OF   HER   FRIENDS  AND   OF 

HER  CITY,   WITH  A  GALLANT  AND 

GENTLE  COURTESY 


20v'8'72 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction    .......         ix 

I.      Women's  Memories  —  Transmuting  the  Past, 
AS    illustrated   by   the  Story   of   the 
Devil  Baby        .....  I 

II.  Women's  Memories  —  Reacting  on  Life,  as 
illustrated  by  the  Story  of  the  Devil 
Baby  .  .  .  .  .  .25 

III.  Women's     Memories  —  Disturbing     Conven- 

tions ......        53 

IV.  Women's   Memories  —  Integrating   Industry        84 
V.      Women's   Memories  —  Challenging  War      .      115 

VI.     A    Personal    Experience    in    Interpretative 

Memory    ......      141 


INTRODUCTION 

For  many  years  at  Hull-House  I  have  at 
intervals  detected  in  certain  old  people,  when 
they  spoke  of  their  past  experiences,  a  tendency 
to  an  idealization,  almost  to  a  romanticism  sug- 
gestive of  the  ardent  dreams  and  groundless 
ambitions  we  have  all  observed  in  the  young 
when  they  recklessly  lay  their  plans  for  the 
future. 

I  have,  moreover,  been  frequently  impressed 
by  the  fact  that  these  romantic  revelations  were 
made  by  old  people  who  had  really  suffered 
much  hardship  and  sorrow,  and  that  the  trans- 
mutation of  their  experiences  was  not  the  result 
of  ignoring  actuality,  but  was  apparently  due  to 
a  power  inherent  in  memory  itself. 

It  was  therefore  a  great  pleasure  when  I 
found  this  aspect  of  memory  delightfully  por- 
trayed by  Sir  Gilbert  Murray  in  his  life  of 
Euripides.  He  writes  that  the  aged  poet, 
when  he  was  officially  made  one  of  the  old  men 
of  Athens,  declared  that  he  could   transmute 


X  INTRODUCTION 

into  song  traditional  tales  of  sorrow  and  wrong- 
doing because,  being  long  past,  they  had  al- 
ready become  part  mystery  and  part  music : 
"  Memory,  that  Memory  who  is  the  Mother 
of  the  Muses,  having  done  her  work  upon 
them." 

Here  was  an  explanation  which  I  might  have 
anticipated ;  it  was  the  Muses  again  at  their 
old  tricks,  —  the  very  mother  of  them  this 
time,  —  thrusting  their  ghostly  fingers  into  the 
delicate  fabric  of  human  experience  to  the  ex- 
treme end  of  life.  I  had  known  before  that 
the  Muses  foregathered  with  the  Spirit  of 
Youth  and  I  had  even  made  a  feeble  attempt 
to  portray  that  companionship,  but  I  was  stupid 
indeed  not  to  see  that  they  are  equally  at  home 
with  the  aged  whose  prosaic  lives  sadly  need 
such  interference. 

Even  with  this  clue  in  my  hands,  so  preoc- 
cupied are  we  all  with  our  own  practical  affairs, 
I  probably  should  never  have  followed  it,  had 
it  not  been  for  the  visit  of  a  mythical  Devil 
Baby  who  so  completely  filled  Hull-House 
with  old  women  coming  to  see  him,  that  for  a 
period  of  six  weeks  I  could  perforce  do  little 
but  give  them  my  attention. 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

When  this  excitement  had  subsided  and  I 
had  written  down  the  corroboration  afforded  by 
their  eager  recitals  in  the  first  two  chapters  of 
this  book,  I  might  have  supposed  myself  to  be 
rid  of  the  matter,  incidentally  having  been 
taught  once  more  that,  while  I  may  receive 
valuable  suggestions  from  classic  literature, 
when  I  really  want  to  learn  about  life,  I  must 
depend  upon  my  neighbors,  for,  as  William 
James  insists,  the  most  instructive  human  doc- 
uments lie  along  the  beaten  pathway. 

The  subject,  however,  was  not  so  easily  dis- 
posed of,  for  certain  elderly  women  among 
these  selfsame  neighbors  disconcertingly  took 
quite  another  line  from  that  indicated  by 
Euripides.  To  my  amazement,  their  remi- 
niscences revealed  an  additional  function  of 
memory,  so  aggressive  and  withal  so  modern, 
that  it  was  quite  impossible,  living  as  I  was  in 
a  Settlement  with  sociological  tendencies,  to 
ignore  it. 

It  was  gradually  forced  upon  my  attention 
that  these  reminiscences  of  the  aged,  even  while 
softening  the  harsh  realities  of  the  past,  exer- 
cise a  vital  power  of  selection  which  often 
necessitates  an  onset  against  the  very  traditions 


xii  INTRODUCTION 

and  conventions  commonly  believed  to  find 
their  stronghold  in  the  minds  of  elderly  people. 
Such  reminiscences  suggested  an  analogy  to 
the  dreams  of  youth  which,  while  covering  the 
future  with  a  shifting  rose-colored  mist,  contain 
within  themselves  the  inchoate  substance  from 
which  the  tough-fibred  forces  of  coming  social 
struggles  are  composed. 

In  the  light  of  this  later  knowledge,  I  was 
impelled  to  write  the  next  two  chapters  of  this 
book,  basing  them  upon  conversations  held 
with  various  women  of  my  acquaintance  whose 
experience  in  family  relationships  or  in  the 
labor  market  had  so  forced  their  conduct  to  a 
variation  from  the  accepted  type  that  there 
emerged  an  indication  of  a  selective  groping 
toward  another  standard.  They  inevitably  sug- 
gested that  a  sufficient  number  of  similar  varia- 
tions might  even,  in  Memory's  leisurely  fashion 
of  upbuilding  tradition,  in  the  end  establish  a 
new  norm. 

Some  of  these  women,  under  the  domination 
of  that  mysterious  autobiographical  impulse 
which  makes  it  more  difficult  to  conceal  the 
truth  than  to  avow  it,  purged  their  souls  in  all 
sincerity  and  unconsciously  made  plain  the  part 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

borne  in  their  hard  lives  by  monstrous  social 
injustices. 

These  conversations  proved  to  be  so  illus- 
trative of  my  second  thesis  that  it  seemed 
scarcely  necessary  to  do  more  than  record  them. 
The  deduction  was  obvious  that  mutual  remi- 
niscences perform  a  valuable  function  in  de- 
termining analogous  conduct  for  large  bodies 
of  people  who  have  no  other  basis  for  like- 
mindedness. 

So  gradual  is  this  process,  so  unconsciously 
are  these  converts  under  Memory's  gentle 
coercion  brought  into  a  spiritual  fellowship, 
that  the  social  changes  thus  inaugurated,  at  least 
until  the  reformers  begin  to  formulate  them 
and  to  accelerate  the  process  through  propa- 
ganda, take  on  the  aspect  of  beneficent  natural 
phenomena.  And  yet,  curiously  enough,  I 
found  that  the  two  functions  of  Memory  —  first, 
its  important  role  in  interpreting  and  appeasing 
life  for  the  individual,  and  second  its  activity 
as  a  selective  agency  in  social  reorganization  — 
were  not  mutually  exclusive,  and  at  moments 
seemed  to  support  each  other.  Certain  con- 
versations even  suggested  that  the  selective 
process  itself  might  be  held  responsible  for  the 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

softened  outlines  of  the  past  to  one  looking 
back,  by  the  natural  blurring  of  nonessentials 
and  the  consequent  throwing  into  high  relief 
of  common  human  experiences. 

The  insistence  of  Memory  upon  the  great 
essentials,  even  to  the  complete  sacrifice  of  its 
inherent  power  to  appease,  was  most  poignantly 
brought  to  my  attention  during  two  months  I 
spent  in  Europe  in  the  summer  of  19 15. 
Desolated  women,  stripped  by  war  of  all  their 
warm  domestic  interests  and  of  children  long 
cherished  in  affectionate  solicitude,  sat  shelter- 
less in  the  devastating  glare  of  Memory.  Be- 
cause by  its  pitiless  light  they  were  forced  to 
look  into  the  black  depths  of  primitive  human 
nature,  occasionally  one  of  these  heart-broken 
women  would  ignore  the  strident  claims  of  the 
present  and  would  insist  that  the  war  was  cut- 
ting at  the  very  taproots  of  the  basic  human 
relations  so  vitally  necessary  to  the  survival  of 
civilization.  I  cannot  hope  to  have  adequately 
reproduced  in  Chapter  V  those  conversations 
which  themselves  partook  of  the  grim  aspect 
of  war. 

It  was  during  this  cataclysmic  summer  in 
Europe  that  I  sometimes  sought  for  a  solace, 


INTRODUCTION  xv 

or  at  least  for  a  source  of  sanity,  by  resting  my 
mind  on  the  immemorial  monuments  of  ancient 
Egypt,  from  which  I  had  once  received  an 
almost  mystic  assurance  of  the  essential  unity 
of  man's  age-long  spiritual  effort.  But  because 
such  guarding  of  continuity  as  Egypt  had 
afforded  me  had  been  associated  with  an  unex- 
pected revival  of  childish  recollections,  I  found 
that  Memory  was  a  chief  factor  also  in  this 
situation.  Therefore,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
these  reminiscences  of  my  childhood  were 
vividly  resuscitated  in  Egypt  by  a  process 
which  postulates  a  reversal  of  the  one  described 
in  the  first  two  chapters  of  this  book,  I  venture 
to  incorporate  my  personal  experience  in  the 
last  chapter.  It  may  suggest  one  more  of  our 
obligations  to  Memory,  that  Protean  Mother, 
who  first  differentiated  primitive  man  from  the 
brute ;  who  makes  possible  our  complicated 
modern  life  so  daily  dependent  on  the  experi- 
ences of  the  past ;  and  upon  whom  at  the 
present  moment  is  thrust  the  sole  responsi- 
bility of  guarding,  for  future  generations,  our 
common  heritage  of  mutual  good-will. 


THE    LONG    ROAD    OF 
WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

CHAPTER  I 

women's  memories — TRANSMUTING  THE 
PAST,  AS  ILLUSTRATED  BY  THE  STORY  OF 
THE  DEVIL  BABY 

Quite  as  it  would  be  hard  for  any  one  of 
us  to  select  the  summer  in  which  he  ceased 
to  live  that  life,  so  ardent  in  childhood  and 
early  youth,  when  all  the  real  happenings 
are  in  the  future,  so  it  must  be  difficult 
for  old  people  to  tell  at  what  period  they 
began  to  regard  the  present  chiefly  as  a 
prolongation  of  the  past.  There  is  no 
doubt,  however,  that  such  instinctive  shift- 
ings  and  reversals  have  taken  place  for 
many  old  people  who,  under  the  control  of 
Memory,  are  actually  living  much  more  in 
the  past  than  in  the  ephemeral  present. 


2  LONG  ROAD  OF  WOMAN'S  MEMORY 

It  is  most  fortunate,  therefore,  that  in 
some  subtle  fashion  these  old  people,  re- 
viewing the  long  road  they  have  travelled, 
are  able  to  transmute  their  own  untoward 
experiences  into  that  which  seems  to  make 
even  the  most  wretched  life  acceptable. 
This  may  possibly  be  due  to  an  instinct  of 
self-preservation,  which  checks  the  devastat- 
ing bitterness  that  would  result  did  they 
recall  over  and  over  again  the  sordid  detail 
of  events  long  past ;  it  is  even  possible  that 
those  people  who  were  not  able  thus  to 
inhibit  their  bitterness  have  died  earlier, 
for  as  one  old  man  recently  reminded  me, 
"It  is  a  true  word  that  worry  can  kill  a 
cat." 

This  permanent  and  elemental  function 
of  Memory  was  graphically  demonstrated 
at  Hull-House  during  a  period  of  several 
weeks  when  we  were  reported  to  be  harbor- 
ing within  its  walls  a  so-called  "Devil 
Baby.'' 

The  knowledge  of  his  existence  burst 
upon  the  residents  of  Hull-House  one  day 
when  three  Italian  women,  with  an  excited 
rush  through  the  door,  demanded  that  he 


TRANSMUTING    THE    PAST  3 

be  shown  to  them.  No  amount  of  denial 
convinced  them  that  he  was  not  there,  for 
they  knew  exactly  what  he  was  hke  with 
his  cloven  hoofs,  his  pointed  ears  and  dimin- 
utive tail ;  the  Devil  Baby  had,  moreover, 
been  able  to  speak  as  soon  as  he  was  born 
and  was  most  shockingly  profane. 

The  three  women  were  but  the  forerunners 
of  a  veritable  multitude  ;  for  six  weeks  from 
every  part  of  the  city  and  suburbs  the 
streams  of  visitors  to  this  mythical  baby 
poured  in  all  day  long  and  so  far  into  the 
night  that  the  regular  activities  of  the  set- 
tlement were  almost  swamped. 

The  Italian  version,  with  a  hundred 
variations,  dealt  with  a  pious  Italian  girl 
married  to  an  atheist.  Her  husband  in  a 
rage  had  torn  a  holy  picture  from  the  bed- 
room wall  saying  that  he  would  quite  as  soon 
have  a  devil  in  the  house  as  such  a  thing, 
whereupon  the  devil  incarnated  himself  in 
her  coming  child.  As  soon  as  the  Devil 
Baby  was  born,  he  ran  about  the  table 
shaking  his  finger  in  deep  reproach  at  his 
father,  who  finally  caught  him  and,  in  fear 
and  trembling,  brought  him  to  Hull-House. 


4  LONG  ROAD  OF  WOMAN'S  MEMORY 

When  the  residents  there,  in  spite  of  the 
baby's  shocking  appearance,  wishing  to  save 
his  soul,  took  him  to  church  for  baptism, 
they  found  that  the  shawl  was  empty  and 
the  Devil  Baby,  fleeing  from  the  holy  water, 
was  running  lightly  over  the  backs  of  the 
pews. 

The  Jewish  version,  again  with  varia- 
tions, was  to  the  effect  that  the  father  of 
six  daughters  had  said  before  the  birth  of  a 
seventh  child  that  he  would  rather  have  a 
devil  in  the  family  than  another  girl,  where- 
upon the  Devil  Baby  promptly  appeared. 

Save  for  a  red  automobile  which  occasion- 
ally figured  in  the  story  and  a  stray  cigar 
which,  in  some  versions,  the  new-born  child 
had  snatched  from  his  father's  lips,  the 
tale  might  have  been  fashioned  a  thousand 
years  ago. 

Although  the  visitors  to  the  Devil  Baby 
included  persons  of  every  degree  of  pros- 
perity and  education,  even  physicians  and 
trained  nurses,  who  assured  us  of  their  sci- 
entific interest,  the  story  constantly  demon- 
strated the  power  of  an  old  wives'  tale 
among  thousands  of   men  and  women   in 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  5 

modern  society  who  are  living  in  a  corner 
of  their  own,  their  vision  fixed,  their  inteUi- 
gence  held  by  some  iron  chain  of  silent  habit. 
To  such  primitive  people  the  metaphor  ap- 
parently is  still  the  very  "stuff  of  life," 
or  rather  no  other  form  of  statement  reaches 
them ;  the  tremendous  tonnage  of  current 
writing  for  them  has  no  existence.  It  was 
in  keeping  with  their  simple  habits  that  the 
reputed  presence  of  the  Devil  Baby  should 
not  reach  the  newspapers  until  the  fifth 
week  of  his  sojourn  at  Hull-House  —  after 
thousands  of  people  had  already  been  in- 
formed of  his  whereabouts  by  the  old  method 
of  passing  news  from  mouth  to  mouth. 

For  six  weeks  as  I  went  about  the 
house,  I  would  hear  a  voice  at  the  telephone 
repeating  for  the  hundredth  time  that  day, 
"No,  there  is  no  such  baby";  "No,  we 
never  had  it  here";  "No,  he  couldn't 
have  seen  it  for  fifty  cents";  "We  didn't 
send  it  anywhere,  because  we  never  had 
it";  "I  don't  mean  to  say  that  your 
sister-in-law  lied,  but  there  must  be  some 
mistake"  ;  "There  is  no  use  getting  up  an 
excursion  from  Milwaukee,  for  there  isn't 


6      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

any  Devil  Baby  at  Hull-House";  "We 
can't  give  reduced  rates,  because  we  are 
not  exhibiting  anything"  ;  and  so  on  and 
on.  As  I  came  near  the  front  door,  I  would 
catch  snatches  of  arguments  that  were 
often  acrimonious:  *'Why  do  you  let  so 
many  people  believe  it,  if  it  isn't  here?" 
"We  have  taken  three  lines  of  cars  to  come 
and  we  have  as  much  right  to  see  it  as 
anybody  else";  "This  is  a  pretty  big 
place,  of  course  you  could  hide  it  easy 
enough"  ;  "What  are  you  saying  that  for, 
are  you  going  to  raise  the  price  of  admis- 
sion  r 

We  had  doubtless  struck  a  case  of  what 
the  psychologists  call  the  "contagion  of 
emotion"  added  to  that  "aesthetic  socia- 
bility" which  impels  any  one  of  us  to  drag 
the  entire  household  to  the  window  when 
a  procession  comes  into  the  street  or  a 
rainbow  appears  in  the  sky.  The  Devil 
Baby  of  course  was  worth  many  proces- 
sions and  rainbows,  and  I  will  confess  that, 
as  the  empty  show  went  on  day  after  day, 
I  quite  revolted  against  such  a  vapid  mani- 
festation   of    even    an    admirable    human 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  7 

trait.  There  was  always  one  exception, 
however ;  whenever  I  heard  the  high  eager 
voices  of  old  women,  I  was  irresistibly  inter- 
ested and  left  anything  I  might  be  doing 
in  order  to  listen  to  them.  As  I  came  down 
the  stairs,  long  before  I  could  hear  what 
they  were  saying,  implicit  in  their  solemn 
and  portentous  old  voices  came  the  ad- 
monition :  — 

"  Wilt  thou  reject  the  past 
Big  with  deep  warnings  ? " 

It  was  a  very  serious  and  genuine  matter 
with  the  old  women,  this  story  so  ancient 
and  yet  so  contemporaneous,  and  they 
flocked  to  Hull-House  from  every  direc- 
tion ;  those  I  had  known  for  many  years, 
others  I  had  never  known  and  some  whom 
I  had  supposed  to  be  long  dead.  But  they 
were  all  alive  and  eager ;  something  in  the 
story  or  in  its  mysterious  sequences  had 
aroused  one  of  those  active  forces  in  human 
nature  which  does  not  take  orders,  but 
insists  only  upon  giving  them.  We  had 
abruptly  come  in  contact  with  a  living  and 
self-assertive  human  quality ! 


8   LONG  ROAD  OF  WOMAN'S  MEMORY 

During  the  weeks  of  excitement  it  was 
the  old  women  who  really  seemed  to  have 
come  into  their  own,  and  perhaps  the  most 
significant  result  of  the  incident  was  the 
reaction  of  the  story  upon  them.  It  stirred 
their  minds  and  memories  as  with  a  magic 
touch,  it  loosened  their  tongues  and  revealed 
the  inner  life  and  thoughts  of  those  who  are 
so  often  inarticulate.  They  are  accustomed 
to  sit  at  home  and  to  hear  the  younger 
members  of  the  family  speak  of  affairs 
quite  outside  their  own  experiences,  some- 
times in  a  language  they  do  not  understand, 
and  at  best  in  quick  glancing  phrases 
which  they  cannot  follow;  "More  than 
half  the  time  I  can't  tell  what  they  are 
talking  about,"  is  an  oft-repeated  complaint. 
The  story  of  the  Devil  Baby  evidently 
put  into  their  hands  the  sort  of  material  with 
which  they  were  accustomed  to  deal.  They 
had  long  used  such  tales  in  their  unremitting 
efforts  at  family  discipline,  ever  since  they 
had  frightened  their  first  children  into  awed 
silence  by  tales  of  bugaboo  men  who  prowled 
in  the  darkness. 

These  old  women  enjoyed  a  moment  of 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  9 

triumph  —  as  if  they  had  made  good  at 
last  and  had  come  into  a  region  of  sanc- 
tions and  punishments  which  they  under- 
stood. Years  of  hving  had  taught  them 
that  recrimination  with  grown-up  children 
and  grandchildren  is  worse  than  useless, 
that  punishments  are  impossible,  that  do- 
mestic instruction  is  best  given  through 
tales  and  metaphors. 

As  the  old  women  talked  with  the  new 
volubility  which  the  story  of  the  Devil 
Baby  had  released  in  them,  going  back 
into  their  long  memories  and  urging  its 
credibility  upon  me,  the  story  seemed  to 
condense  that  mystical  wisdom  which  be- 
comes deposited  in  the  heart  of  man  by 
unnoticed  innumerable  experiences. 

Perhaps  my  many  conversations  with 
these  aged  visitors  crystallized  thoughts 
and  impressions  I  had  been  receiving 
through  years,  or  the  tale  itself  may  have 
ignited  a  fire,  as  it  were,  whose  light  il- 
lumined some  of  my  darkest  memories  of 
neglected  and  uncomfortable  old  age,  of 
old  peasant  women  who  had  ruthlessly 
probed  into  the  ugly  depths  of  human  na- 


lO      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

ture  in  themselves  and  others.  Many  of 
them  who  came  to  see  the  Devil  Baby  had 
been  forced  to  face  tragic  experiences,  the 
powers  of  brutality  and  horror  had  had 
full  scope  in  their  lives  and  for  years  they 
had  had  acquaintance  with  disaster  and 
death.  Such  old  women  do  not  shirk  life's 
misery  by  feeble  idealism,  for  they  are 
long  past  the  stage  of  make-believe.  They 
relate  without  flinching  the  most  hideous 
experiences:  "My  face  has  had  this  queer 
twist  for  now  nearly  sixty  years  ;  I  was 
ten  when  it  got  that  way,  the  night  after 
I  saw  my  father  do  my  mother  to  death 
with  his  knife."  *'Yes,  I  had  fourteen 
children  ;  only  two  grew  to  be  men  and 
both  of  them  were  killed  in  the  same  ex- 
plosion. I  was  never  sure  they  brought 
home  the  right  bodies."  But  even  the 
most  hideous  sorrows  which  the  old  women 
related  had  apparently  subsided  into  the 
paler  emotion  of  ineffectual  regret,  after 
Memory  had  long  done  her  work  upon 
them ;  the  old  people  seemed,  in  some  un- 
accountable way,  to  lose  all  bitterness  and 
resentment  against  life,  or  rather  to  be  so 


TRANSMUTING    THE    PAST  II 

completely  without  it  that  they  must  have 
lost  it  long  since. 

None  of  them  had  a  word  of  blame  for 
undutiful  children  or  heedless  grandchil- 
dren, because  apparently  the  petty  and 
transitory  had  fallen  away  from  their 
austere  old  age,  the  fires  were  burnt  out, 
resentments,  hatreds,  and  even  cherished 
sorrows  had  become  actually  unintelligible. 

Perhaps  those  women,  because  they  had 
come  to  expect  nothing  more  from  life  and 
had  perforce  ceased  from  grasping  and 
striving,  had  obtained,  if  not  renunciation, 
at  least  that  quiet  endurance  which  al- 
lows the  wounds  of  the  spirit  to  heal. 
Through  their  stored-up  habit  of  acquies- 
cence, they  offered  a  fleeting  glimpse  of 
the  translucent  wisdom,  so  often  embodied 
in  the  old,  but  so  difficult  to  portray.  It 
is  doubtless  what  Michael  Angelo  had  in 
mind  when  he  made  the  Sybils  old,  what 
Dante  meant  by  the  phrase  "those  who 
had  learned  of  life,"  and  the  age-worn 
minstrel  who  turned  into  song  a  Memory 
which  was  more  that  of  history  and  tra- 
dition than  his  own. 


12      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

In  contrast  to  the  visitors  to  the  Devil 
Baby  who  spoke  only  such  words  of  groping 
wisdom  as  they  were  able,  were  other  old 
women  who,  although  they  had  already 
reconciled  themselves  to  much  misery,  were 
still  enduring  more  :  "You  might  say  it's  a 
disgrace  to  have  your  son  beat  you  up  for 
the  sake  of  a  bit  of  money  you've  earned 
by  scrubbing  —  your  own  man  is  different 
—  but  I  haven't  the  heart  to  blame  the  boy 
for  doing  what  he's  seen  all  his  life,  his 
father  forever  went  wild  when  the  drink 
was  in  him  and  struck  me  to  the  very 
day  of  his  death.  The  ugliness  was  born 
in  the  boy  as  the  marks  of  the  Devil  was 
born  in  the  poor  child  up-stairs." 

Some  of  these  old  women  had  struggled 
for  weary  years  with  poverty  and  much 
childbearing,  had  known  what  it  was  to  be 
bullied  and  beaten  by  their  husbands, 
neglected  and  ignored  by  their  prosperous 
children,  and  burdened  by  the  support  of 
the  imbecile  and  the  shiftless  ones.  They 
had  literally  gone  "Deep  written  all  their 
days  with  care." 

One  old  woman  actually  came  from  the 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  13 

poorhouse,  having  heard  of  the  Devil  Baby 
"through  a  lady  from  Polk  Street  visiting 
an  old  friend  who  has  a  bed  in  our  ward." 
It  was  no  slight  achievement  for  the  penni- 
less and  crippled  old  inmate  to  make  her 
escape.  She  had  asked  "a  young  bar-keep 
in  a  saloon  across  the  road"  to  lend  her  ten 
cents,  offering  as  security  the  fact  that  she 
was  an  old  acquaintance  at  Hull-House  who 
could  not  be  refused  so  slight  a  loan.  She 
marvelled  at  some  length  over  the  good- 
ness of  the  young  man,  for  she  had  not  had 
a  dime  to  spend  for  a  drink  for  the  last  six 
months,  and  he  and  the  conductor  had 
been  obliged  to  lift  her  into  the  street  car 
by  main  strength.  She  was  naturally  much 
elated  over  the  achievement  of  her  escape. 
To  be  sure,  from  the  men's  side,  they  were 
always  walking  off  in  the  summer  and 
taking  to  the  road,  living  like  tramps  they 
did,  in  a  way  no  one  from  the  woman's 
side  would  demean  herself  to  do  ;  but  to 
have  left  in  a  street  car  like  a  lady,  with 
money  to  pay  her  own  fare,  was  quite  a 
different  matter,  although  she  was  indeed 
"clean  wore  out"  by  the  effort.     However, 


14      LONG    ROAD    OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

it  was  clear  that  she  would  consider  herself 
well  repaid  by  a  sight  of  the  Devil  Baby 
and  that  not  only  the  inmates  of  her  own 
ward,  but  those  in  every  other  ward  in  the 
house  would  be  made  to  "sit  up"  when  she 
got  back  ;  it  would  liven  them  all  up  a  bit, 
and  she  hazarded  the  guess  that  she  would 
have  to  tell  them  about  that  baby  at  least 
a  dozen  times  a  day. 

As  she  cheerfully  rambled  on,  we  weakly 
postponed  telling  her  there  was  no  Devil 
Baby,  first  that  she  might  have  a  cup  of 
tea  and  rest,  and  then  through  a  sheer  de- 
sire to  withhold  a  blow  from  a  poor  old 
body  who  had  received  so  many  through- 
out a  long,  hard  life. 

As  I  recall  those  unreal  weeks,  it  was  in 
her  presence  that  I  found  myself  for  the 
first  time  vaguely  wishing  that  I  could 
administer  comfort  by  the  simple  device  of 
not  asserting  too  dogmatically  that  the 
Devil  Baby  had  never  been  at  Hull-House. 

Our  guest  recalled  with  great  pride  that 
her  grandmother  had  possessed  second 
sight ;  that  her  mother  had  heard  the 
Banshee  three  times  and  that  she,  herself, 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  15 

had  heard  it  once.  All  this  gave  her  a 
certain  proprietary  interest  in  the  Devil 
Baby  and  I  suspected  she  cherished  a  secret 
hope  that  when  she  should  lay  her  eyes 
upon  him,  her  inherited  gifts  might  be 
able  to  reveal  the  meaning  of  the  strange 
portent.  At  the  least,  he  would  afford  a 
proof  that  her  family-long  faith  in  such 
matters  was  justified.  Her  misshapen 
hands  lying  on  her  lap  fairly  trembled  with 
eagerness. 

It  may  have  been  because  I  was  still 
smarting  under  the  recollection  of  the 
disappointment  we  had  so  wantonly  in- 
flicted upon  our  visitor  from  the  poorhouse 
that  the  very  next  day  I  found  myself 
almost  agreeing  with  her  whole-hearted 
acceptance  of  the  past  as  of  much  more 
importance  than  the  mere  present ;  at  least 
for  half  an  hour  the  past  seemed  endowed 
also  for  me  with  a  profounder  and  more 
ardent  life. 

This  impression  was  received  in  connec- 
tion with  an  old  woman,  sturdy  in  her 
convictions,  although  long  since  bedrid- 
den, who  had  doggedly  refused  to  believe 


l6      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

that  there  was  no  Devil  Baby  at  Hull- 
House,  unless  "herself"  told  her  so.  Be- 
cause of  her  mounting  irritation  with  the 
envoys  who  one  and  all  came  back  to  her 
to  report  "they  say  it  ain't  there,"  it  seemed 
well  that  I  should  go  promptly  before  "she 
fashed  herself  into  the  grave."  As  I  walked 
along  the  street  and  even  as  I  went  up  the 
ramshackle  outside  stairway  of  the  rear 
cottage  and  through  the  dark  corridor  to 
the  "second  floor  back"  where  she  lay  in 
her  untidy  bed,  I  was  assailed  by  a  veri- 
table temptation  to  give  her  a  full  descrip- 
tion of  the  Devil  Baby,  which  by  this  time 
I  knew  so  accurately  (for  with  a  hundred 
variations  to  select  from  I  could  have 
made  a  monstrous  infant  almost  worthy 
of  his  name),  and  also  to  refrain  from  put- 
ting too  much  stress  on  the  fact  that  he 
had  never  been  really  and  truly  at  Hull- 
House. 

I  found  my  mind  hastily  marshalling 
arguments  for  not  disturbing  her  belief  in 
the  story  which  had  so  evidently  brought 
her  a  vivid  interest  long  denied  her.  She 
lived  alone  with  her  young  grandson,  who 


TRANSMUTING    THE    PAST  17 

went  to  work  every  morning  at  seven  o'clock 
and  save  for  the  short  visits  made  by  the 
visiting  nurse  and  by  kind  neighbors,  her 
long  day  was  monotonous  and  undisturbed. 
But  the  story  of  a  Devil  Baby,  with  his 
existence  officially  corroborated  as  it  were, 
would  give  her  a  lodestone  which  would 
attract  the  neighbors  far  and  wide  and 
exalt  her  once  more  into  the  social  impor- 
tance she  had  had  twenty-four  years  be- 
fore when  I  had  first  known  her.  She  was 
then  the  proprietor  of  the  most  prosperous 
second-hand  store  on  a  street  full  of  them, 
her  shiftless,  drinking  husband  and  her 
jolly,  good-natured  sons  doing  exactly  what 
she  told  them  to  do.  This,  however,  was 
long  past,  for  "owing  to  the  drink,"  in  her 
own  graphic  phrase,  "the  old  man,  the 
boys,  and  the  business,  too,  were  clean 
gone"  and  there  was  "nobody  left  but  little 
Tom  and  me  and  nothing  for  us  to  live 
on." 

I  remember  how  well  she  used  to  tell  a 
story  when  I  once  tried  to  collect  some 
folk-lore  for  Mr.  Yeats  to  prove  that  an 
Irish  peasant  does  not  lose  his  faith  in  the 


i8      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

little  people  nor  his  knowledge  of  Gaelic 
phrases  simply  because  he  is  living  in  a 
city.  She  had  at  that  time  told  me  a 
wonderful  tale  concerning  a  red  cloak 
worn  by  an  old  woman  to  a  freshly  dug 
grave.  The  story  of  the  Devil  Baby  would 
give  her  material  worthy  of  her  powers, 
but  of  course  she  must  be  able  to  believe 
it  with  all  her  heart.  She  could  live  only 
a  few  months  at  the  very  best,  I  argued  to 
myself;  why  not  give  her  this  vivid  in- 
terest and  through  it  awake  those  earliest 
recollections  of  that  long-accumulated  folk- 
lore with  its  magic  power  to  transfigure  and 
eclipse  the  sordid  and  unsatisfactory  sur- 
roundings in  which  life  is  actually  spent  ? 
I  solemnly  assured  myself  that  the  imag- 
ination of  old  age  needs  to  be  fed  and  prob- 
ably has  quite  as  imperious  a  claim  as 
that  of  youth,  which  levies  upon  us  so  re- 
morselessly with  its  ''I  want  a  fairy  story, 
but  I  don't  like  you  to  begin  by  saying  that 
it  isn't  true."  Impatiently  I  found  myself 
challenging  the  educators  who  had  given 
us  no  pedagogical  instructions  for  the 
treatment  of  old  age,   although  they  had 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  19 

fairly  overinformed  us  as  to  the  use  of  the 
fairy  tale  with  children. 

The  little  room  was  stuffed  with  a  mag- 
pie collection,  the  usual  odds  and  ends  which 
compose  an  old  woman's  treasures,  aug- 
mented in  this  case  by  various  articles 
which  a  second-hand  store,  even  of  the  most 
flourishing  sort,  could  not  sell.  In  the 
picturesque  confusion,  if  anywhere  in  Chi- 
cago, an  urbanized  group  of  the  little  people 
might  dwell ;  they  would  certainly  find  the 
traditional  atmosphere  which  they  strictly 
require,  marvelling  faith  and  unalloyed 
reverence.  At  any  rate,  an  eager  old  woman 
aroused  to  her  utmost  capacity  of  wonder 
and  credulity  was  the  very  soil,  prepared 
to  a  nicety,  for  planting  the  seed-thought 
of  the  Devil  Baby.  If  the  object  of  my 
errand  had  been  an  hour's  reading  to  a 
sick  woman,  it  would  have  been  accounted 
to  me  for  philanthropic  righteousness,  and 
if  the  chosen  reading  had  lifted  her  mind 
from  her  bodily  discomforts  and  harassing 
thoughts  so  that  she  forgot  them  all  for 
one  fleeting  moment,  how  pleased  I  should 
have  been  with  the  success  of  my  effort. 


20     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

But  here  I  was  with  a  story  at  my  tongue's 
end,  stupidly  hesitating  to  give  it  validity, 
although  the  very  words  were  on  my  lips. 
I  was  still  arguing  the  case  with  myself 
when  I  stood  on  the  threshold  of  her  room 
and  caught  the  indomitable  gleam  of  her 
eye,  fairly  daring  me  to  deny  the  existence 
of  the  Devil  Baby,  her  slack  dropsical  body 
so  responding  to  her  overpowering  excite- 
ment that  for  the  moment  she  looked  alert 
in  her  defiance  and  positively  menacing. 

But,  as  in  the  case  of  many  another  weak 
soul,  the  decision  was  taken  out  of  my 
hands,  my  very  hesitation  was  enough,  for 
nothing  is  more  certain  than  that  the  bearer 
of  a  magic  tale  never  stands  dawdling  on 
the  door-step.  Slowly  the  gleam  died  out 
of  the  expectant  old  eyes,  the  erect  shoul- 
ders sagged  and  pulled  forward,  and  I  saw 
only  too  plainly  that  the  poor  old  woman 
had  accepted  one  more  disappointment  in  a 
life  already  overflowing  with  them.  She 
was  violently  thrown  back  into  all  the 
limitations  of  her  personal  experience  and 
surroundings,  and  that  larger  life  she  had 
anticipated    so    eagerly    was    as    suddenly 


TRANSMUTING    THE    PAST  2i 

shut  away  from  her  as  if  a  door  had  been 
slammed  in  her  face. 

I  never  encountered  that  particular 
temptation  again,  though  she  was  no  more 
pitiful  than  many  of  the  aged  visitors  whom 
the  Devil  Baby  brought  to  Hull-House. 
But,  perhaps  as  a  result  of  this  experience, 
I  gradually  lost  the  impression  that  the 
old  people  were  longing  for  a  second  chance 
at  life,  to  live  it  all  over  again  and  to  live 
more  fully  and  wisely,  and  I  became  more 
reconciled  to  the  fact  that  many  of  them 
had  little  opportunity  for  meditation  or  for 
bodily  rest,  but  must  keep  on  working 
with  their  toil-worn  hands,  in  spite  of 
weariness  or  faintness  of  heart. 

The  vivid  interest  of  so  many  old  women 
in  the  story  of  the  Devil  Baby  may  have 
been  an  unconscious,  although  powerful, 
testimony  that  tragic  experiences  gradually 
become  dressed  in  such  trappings  in  order 
that  their  spent  agony  may  prove  of  some 
use  to  a  world  which  learns  at  the  hard- 
est ;  and  that  the  strivings  and  sufferings 
of  men  and  women  long  since  dead,  their 
emotions   no   longer   connected   with   flesh 


22      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

and  blood,  are  thus  transmuted  into  leg- 
endary wisdom.  The  young  are  forced  to 
heed  the  warning  in  such  a  tale,  although 
for  the  most  part  it  is  so  easy  for  them  to 
disregard  the  words  of  the  aged.  That 
the  old  women  who  came  to  visit  the  Devil 
Baby  believed  that  the  story  would  se- 
cure them  a  hearing  at  home  was  evident, 
and  as  they  prepared  themselves  with 
every  detail  of  it,  their  old  faces  shone  with 
a  timid  satisfaction.  Their  features,  worn 
and  scarred  by  harsh  living,  as  effigies 
built  into  the  floor  of  an  old  church  become 
dim  and  defaced  by  rough-shod  feet,  grew 
poignant  and  solemn.  In  the  midst  of 
their  double  bewilderment,  both  that  the 
younger  generation  was  walking  in  such 
strange  paths  and  that  no  one  would  lis- 
ten to  them,  for  one  moment  there  flickered 
up  the  last  hope  of  a  disappointed  life, 
that  it  may  at  least  serve  as  a  warning, 
while  affording  material  for  an  exciting 
narrative. 

Sometimes  in  talking  to  a  woman  who 
was  "but  a  hair's  breadth  this  side  of 
the  darkness,"  I  realized  that  old  age  has 


TRANSMUTING   THE    PAST  23 

its  own  expression  for  the  mystic  renun- 
ciation of  the  world.  Their  impatience 
with  all  non-essentials,  the  craving  to  be 
free  from  hampering  bonds  and  soft  con- 
ditions, recalled  Tolstoy's  last  impetuous 
journey,  and  I  was  once  more  grateful 
to  his  genius  for  making  clear  another 
unintelligible  impulse  of  bewildered  hu- 
manity. 

Often,  in  the  midst  of  a  conversation,  one 
of  these  touching  old  women  would  quietly 
express  a  longing  for  death,  as  if  it  were  a 
natural  fulfilment  of  an  inmost  desire, 
with  a  sincerity  and  anticipation  so  gen- 
uine that  I  would  feel  abashed  in  her 
presence,  ashamed  to  *' cling  to  this  strange 
thing  that  shines  in  the  sunlight  and  to  be 
sick  with  love  for  it."  Such  impressions 
were,  in  their  essence,  transitory,  but  one 
result  from  the  hypothetical  visit  of  the 
Devil  Baby  to  Hull-House  will,  I  think, 
remain :  a  realization  of  the  sifting  and 
reconciling  power  inherent  in  Memory  it- 
self. The  old  women,  with  much  to  ag- 
gravate and  little  to  soften  the  habitual 
bodily    discomforts   of  old    age,    exhibited 


24      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

an  emotional  serenity  so  vast  and  so  reas- 
suring, that  I  found  myself  perpetually  spec- 
ulating upon  how  soon  the  fleeting  and 
petty  emotions  which  now  seem  unduly 
important  to  us  might  be  thus  transmuted  ; 
at  what  moment  we  might  expect  the  in- 
consistencies and  perplexities  of  life  to  be 
brought  under  this  appeasing  Memory  with 
its  ultimate  power  to  increase  the  elements 
of  beauty  and  significance  and  to  reduce, 
if  not  to  eliminate,  all  sense  of  resentment. 


CHAPTER  II 

women's     memories  —  REACTING     ON     LIFE 

AS     ILLUSTRATED     BY     THE     STORY     OF     THE 

DEVIL    BABY 

During  the  weeks  when  the  Devil  Baby 
seemed  to  occupy  every  room  in  Hull- 
House,  I  was  conscious  that  all  human 
vicissitudes  are,  in  the  end,  melted  down  into 
reminiscence,  and  that  a  metaphorical  state- 
ment of  the  basic  experiences  which  are 
implicit  in  human  nature  itself,  however 
crude  in  form  the  story  may  be,  has  a  singu- 
lar power  of  influencing  daily  living. 

At  moments  we  also  seemed  to  glimpse 
the  process  through  which  such  tales  had 
been  evolved.  As  our  visitors  to  the  Devil 
Baby  came  day  by  day,  it  gradually  be- 
came evident  that  the  simpler  women  were 
moved  not  wholly  by  curiosity,  but  that 
many  of  them  prized  the  story  as  a  valu- 
able instrument  in  the  business  of  living. 

25 


26      LONG  ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

From  them  and  from  the  surprising  number 
of  others  who  had  been  sent  by  the  aged 
and  the  bed-ridden  to  secure  an  exact 
history  and  description  of  the  child,  the 
suggestion  finally  became  quite  irresis- 
tible that  such  a  story,  outlining  a  great 
abstraction,  may  once  have  performed  the 
high  service  of  tradition  and  discipline  in 
the  beginnings  of  a  civilized  family  life. 

The  legend  exhibited  all  the  persistence 
of  one  of  those  tales  which  has  doubtless 
been  preserved  through  the  centuries  be- 
cause of  its  taming  effects  upon  recalci- 
trant husbands  and  fathers.  Shamefaced 
men  brought  to  Hull-House  by  their  women 
folk  to  see  the  baby,  but  ill  concealed  their 
triumph  when  there  proved  to  be  no  such 
visible  sign  of  retribution  for  domestic 
derelictions.  On  the  other  hand,  numbers 
of  men  came  by  themselves,  one  group 
from  a  neighboring  factory  on  their  *'own 
time"  offered  to  pay  twenty-five  cents,  a 
half  dollar,  two  dollars  apiece  to  see  the 
child,  insisting  that  it  must  be  at  Hull- 
House  because  "the  women  had  seen  it." 
To  my  query  as  to  whether  they  supposed 


REACTING   ON   LIFE  27 

we  would,  for  money,  exhibit  a  poor  little 
deformed  baby,  if  one  had  been  born  in  the 
neighborhood,  they  replied:  "Sure,  why 
not?"  and  "it  teaches  a  good  lesson,  too," 
they  added  as  an  afterthought,  or  perhaps 
as  a  concession  to  the  strange  moral  stand- 
ards of  a  place  like  Hull-House.  All  the 
members  in  this  group  of  hard-working 
men,  in  spite  of  a  certain  swagger  towards 
one  another  and  a  tendency  to  bully  the 
derelict  showman,  wore  a  hang-dog  look 
betraying  that  sense  of  unfair  treatment 
which  a  man  is  so  apt  to  feel  when  his 
womankind  makes  an  appeal  to  the  super- 
natural. In  their  determination  to  see 
the  child,  the  men  recklessly  divulged  much 
more  concerning  their  motives  than  they 
had  meant  to  do.  Their  talk  confirmed 
my  impression  that  such  a  story  may  still 
act  as  a  restraining  influence  in  the  sphere 
of  marital  conduct  which,  next  to  primitive 
religion,  has  always  afforded  the  most  fer- 
tile field  for  irrational  taboos  and  savage 
punishments. 

What  story  could  be  better  than  this  to 
secure   sympathy   for   the   mother   of  too 


28      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

many  daughters  and  contumely  for  the 
irritated  father ;  the  touch  of  mysticism, 
the  supernatural  sphere  in  which  it  was 
placed,  would  render  a  man  quite  helpless. 

The  story  of  the  Devil  Baby,  evolved  in 
response  to  the  imperative  needs  of  anxious 
wives  and  mothers,  recalls  the  theory  that 
woman  first  fashioned  the  fairy  story,  that 
combination  of  wisdom  and  romance,  in  an 
effort  to  tame  her  mate  and  to  make  him 
a  better  father  to  her  children,  until  such 
stories  finally  became  a  crude  creed  for 
domestic  conduct,  softening  the  treatment 
men  accorded  to  women.  Because  such 
stories,  expressing  the  very  essence  of 
human  emotion,  did  not  pretend  to  imitate 
the  outside  of  life,  they  were  careless  of 
verisimilitude  and  absolutely  indifferent 
to  the  real  world.  They  did,  however, 
meet  an  essential  requirement  of  the  good 
story,  in  that  they  dealt  with  fundamental 
experiences. 

These  first  pitiful  efforts  of  women  were 
so  widespread  and  powerful  that  we  have 
not  yet  escaped  their  influence.  As  sub- 
conscious memories,  they  still   cast   vague 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  29 

shadows  upon  the  vast  spaces  of  Hfe,  shad- 
ows that  are  dim  and  distorted  because  of 
their  distant  origin.  They  remind  us 
that  for  thousands  of  years  women  had 
nothing  to  oppose  against  unthinkable  bru- 
tahty  save  "the  charm  of  words,"  no  other 
implement  with  which  to  subdue  the  fierce- 
nesses of  the  world  about  them.  Only 
through  words  could  they  hope  to  arouse 
the  generosity  of  strength,  to  secure  a 
measure  of  pity  for  themselves  and  their 
children,  to  so  protect  the  life  they  had 
produced  that  "the  precious  vintage  stored 
from  their  own  agony"  might  not  wan- 
tonly be  spilled  upon  the  ground.  Pos- 
sibly the  multitude  of  life's  failures,  the 
obscure  victims  of  unspeakable  wrong  and 
brutality,  have  embodied  their  memories 
in  a  literature  of  their  own,  of  which  the 
story  of  the  Devil  Baby  is  a  specimen, 
crude  and  ugly  in  form,  as  would  be  inevi- 
table, but  still  bringing  relief  to  the  sur- 
charged heart. 

During  the  weeks  that  the  Devil  Baby 
drew  multitudes  of  visitors  to  Hull-House, 
my  mind  was  opened  to  the  fact  that  new 


30  LONG  ROAD  OF  WOMAN'S  MEMORY 

knowledge  derived  from  concrete  experi- 
ence is  continually  being  made  available 
for  the  guidance  of  human  life  ;  that  hum- 
ble women  are  still  establishing  rules  of 
conduct  as  best  they  may,  to  counteract 
the  base  temptations  of  a  man's  world. 
I  saw  a  new  significance  in  the  fact  that 
thousands  of  women,  for  instance,  make 
it  a  standard  of  domestic  virtue  that  a 
man  must  not  touch  his  pay  envelope,  but 
bring  it  home  unopened  to  his  wife.  High 
praise  is  contained  in  the  phrase,  "We 
have  been  married  twenty  years  and  he 
never  once  opened  his  own  envelope,"  or 
covert  blame  in  the  statement,  "Of  course 
he  got  to  gambling ;  what  can  you  expect 
from  a  man  who  always  opens  his  own 
pay? 

These  humble  domestic  virtues,  of  which 
women  see  the  need  so  much  more  vividly 
than  men  do,  have  furthermore  developed 
their  penalties.  The  latter,  too,  are  put  into 
aphorisms  which,  in  time,  when  Memory 
has  done  her  work  upon  them,  may  become 
legendary  wisdom. 

Such   a  penalty  was  recently  illustrated 


REACTING   ON   LIFE  31 

in  our  neighborhood  by  the  fate  of  an  old 
man  who  was  found  in  his  room  almost 
starved  to  death.  He  was  pointed  out  by 
many  of  our  neighbors  as  an  example  of 
the  inevitable  fate  of  one  who  deserts  his 
family  and  therefore,  "without  a  woman  to 
keep  him  straight,"  falls  into  drink  and 
shiftlessness  and  the  endless  paths  of  wrong- 
doing, so  that  loneliness  and  destitution 
inevitably  overtake  his  old  age. 

The  women  were  so  fatalistically  certain 
of  this  relation  of  punishment  to  domestic 
sin,  of  reward  to  domestic  virtue,  that  when 
they  talked  about  them,  as  they  so  con- 
stantly did  in  connection  with  the  Devil 
Baby,  it  often  sounded  as  if  they  were 
using  the  words  of  a  widely  known  ritual. 
Among  the  visitors  to  the  Devil  Baby  were 
many  foreign-born  peasant  women  who, 
when  they  had  come  to  America,  had  been 
suddenly  subjected  to  the  complicated  and 
constantly  changing  environment  of  city 
life,  and,  finding  no  outlet  for  many  in- 
herited tendencies,  might  easily  have  been 
thrown  into  that  state  described  by  psy- 
chologists as  one  of  "baulked  disposition." 


32      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

To  them  this  simple  tale,  with  its  direct 
connection  between  cause  and  effect, 
between  wrong-doing  and  punishment, 
brought  soothing  and  relief,  and  restored 
a  shaken  confidence  as  to  the  righteous- 
ness of  the  universe.  They  used  the  story 
not  only  to  tame  restless  husbands,  but 
mothers  threatened  their  daughters  that 
if  they  went  to  dance  halls  or  out  to  walk 
with  strange  young  men,  they  would  be 
eternally  disgraced  by  devil  babies.  As 
the  story  grew,  the  girls  themselves  seized 
upon  it  as  a  palpable  punishment  to  be 
held  over  the  heads  of  reckless  friends. 
That  the  tale  was  useful  was  evidenced  by 
many  letters  similar  to  the  anonymous 
epistle  here  given. 

"me  and  my  friends  we  work  in  talor  shop  and 
when  we  are  going  home  on  the  roby  street  car 
where  we  get  off  that  car  at  blue  island  ave.  we  will 
meet  some  fellows  sitting  at  that  street  where  they 
drink  some  beer  from  pail,  they  keep  look  in  cars 
all  time  and  they  will  wait  and  see  if  we  will  come 
sometimes  we  will  have  to  work,  but  they  will  wait 
so  long  they  are  tired  and  they  dont  care  they  get 
rest  so  long  but  a  girl  what  works  in  twine  mill  saw 
them  talk  with  us  we  know  her  good  and  she  say 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  33 

what  youse  talk  with  old  drunk  man  for  we  shall 
come  to  thier  dance  when  it  will  be  they  will  tell  us 
and  we  should  know  all  about  where  to  see  them  that 
girl  she  say  oh  if  you  will  go  with  them  you  will  get 
devils  baby  like  some  other  girls  did  who  we  knows, 
she  say  Jane  Addams  she  will  show  one  like  that  in 
Hull  House  if  you  will  go  down  there  we  shall  come 
sometime  and  we  will  see  if  that  is  trouth  we  do  not 
believe  her  for  she  is  friendly  with  them  old  men 
herself  when  she  go  out  from  her  work  they  will 
wink  to  her  and  say  something  else  to.  We  will 
go  down  and  see  you  and  make  a  lie  from  what  she 
say." 

Because  the  Devil  Baby  embodied  an 
undeserved  wrong  to  a  poor  mother  whose 
tender  child  had  been  claimed  by  the  forces 
of  evil,  his  merely  reputed  presence  had 
power  to  attract  to  Hull-House  hundreds 
of  women  who  had  been  humbled  and  dis- 
graced by  their  children ;  mothers  of  the 
feeble-minded,  of  the  vicious,  of  the  crim- 
inal, of  the  prostitute.  In  their  talk  it 
was  as  if  their  long  role  of  maternal  apology 
and  protective  reticence  had  at  last  broken 
down,  as  if  they  could  speak  out  freely  be- 
cause for  once  a  man  responsible  for  an 
ill-begotten  child  had  been  "met  up  with'* 


34      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

and  had  received  his  deserts.  Their  sin- 
ister version  of  the  story  was  that  the  father 
of  the  Devil  Baby  had  married  without 
confessing  a  hideous  crime  committed  years 
before,  thus  basely  deceiving  both  his  in- 
nocent young  bride  and  the  good  priest 
who  performed  the  solemn  ceremony ;  that 
the  sin  had  become  incarnate  in  his  child 
which,  to  the  horror  of  the  young  and 
trusting  mother,  had  been  born  with  all 
the  outward  aspects  of  the  devil  himself. 

As  if  drawn  by  a  magnet,  these  forlorn 
women  issued  forth  from  the  many  homes 
in  which  dwelt  "the  two  unprofitable 
goddesses.  Poverty  and  Impossibility.'* 
Occasionally  it  seemed  to  me  that  the 
women  were  impelled  by  a  longing  to  see 
one  good  case  of  retribution  before  they 
died,  as  a  bullied  child  hopes  to  deal  at 
least  one  crushing  blow  at  his  tormentor 
when  he  "grows  up,"  but  I  think,  on  the 
whole,  such  an  explanation  was  a  mistake ; 
it  is  more  probable  that  the  avidity  of  the 
women  demonstrated  that  the  story  itself, 
like  all  interpretative  art,  was  "one  of  those 
free,  unconscious  attempts  to  satisfy,  out- 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  35 

side  of  life,  those  cravings  which  Hfe  itself 
leaves  unsatisfied."  At  moments,  however, 
baffled  desires,  sharp  cries  of  pain,  echoes 
of  justices  unfulfilled,  the  original  material 
from  which  such  tales  are  fashioned,  would 
defy  Memxory's  appeasing  power  and  break 
through  the  rigid  restraints  imposed  by  all 
Art,  even  that  unconscious  of  itself. 

With  an  understanding  quickened,  per- 
haps, through  my  own  acquaintance  with 
the  mysterious  child,  I  listened  to  many 
tragic  reminiscences  from  the  visiting 
women;  of  premature  births,  ''because  he 
kicked  me  in  the  side"  ;  of  children  maimed 
and  burnt  because  "I  had  no  one  to  leave 
them  with  when  I  went  to  work"  ;  women 
had  seen  the  tender  flesh  of  growing  little 
bodies  given  over  to  death  because  "he 
wouldn't  let  me  send  for  the  doctor,"  or 
because  "there  was  no  money  to  pay  for 
the  medicine."  But  even  these  mothers, 
rendered  childless  through  insensate  bru- 
tality, were  less  pitiful  than  some  of  the 
others,  who  might  well  have  cried  aloud  of 
their  children  as  did  a  distracted  mother  of 
her  child  centuries  ago  : 


36      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

"That  God  should  send  this  one  thing  more 
Of  hunger  and  of  dread,  a  door 
Set  wide  to  every  wind  of  pain  !" 

Such  was  the  mother  of  a  feeble-minded 
boy  who  said  :  "I  didn't  have  a  devil  baby 
myself,  but  I  bore  a  poor  'innocent'  who 
made  me  fight  devils  for  twenty-three  years." 
She  told  of  her  son's  experiences  from  the 
time  the  other  little  boys  had  put  him  up 
to  stealing  that  they  might  hide  in  safety 
and  leave  him  to  be  found  with  "the 
goods  on  him,"  until  grown  into  a  huge 
man  he  fell  into  the  hands  of  professional 
burglars  ;  he  was  evidently  the  dupe  and 
stool-pigeon  of  the  vicious  and  criminal  until 
the  very  day  he  was  locked  into  the  State 
Penitentiary.  "If  people  played  with  him 
a  little,  he  went  right  off  and  did  anything 
they  told  him  to,  and  now  he's  been  sent 
up  for  life.  We  call  such  innocents  'God's 
Fools'  in  the  old  country,  but  over  here 
the  Devil  himself  gets  them.  I've  fought 
off  bad  men  and  boys  from  the  poor  lamb 
with  my  very  fists  ;  nobody  ever  came  near 
the  house  except  such-like  and  the  police 
officers,  who  were  always  arresting  him." 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  37 

There  were  a  goodly  number  of  visitors 
to  the  Devil  Baby  of  the  type  of  those  to 
be  found  in  every  large  city,  who  are  on  the 
verge  of  nervous  collapse,  or  who  exhibit 
many  symptoms  of  mental  aberration,  and 
yet  are  sufficiently  normal  to  be  at  large 
most  of  the  time,  and  to  support  themselves 
by  drudgery  which  requires  little  mental 
effort,  although  the  exhaustion  resulting 
from  the  work  they  are  able  to  do  is  the 
one  thing  from  which  they  should  be  most 
carefully  protected.  One  such  woman,  evi- 
dently obtaining  inscrutable  comfort  from 
the  story  of  the  Devil  Baby  even  after  she 
had  become  convinced  that  we  harbored 
no  such  creature,  came  many  times  to  tell 
of  her  longing  for  her  son,  who  had  joined 
the  army  eighteen  months  before  and  was 
now  stationed  in  Alaska.  She  always  be- 
gan with  the  same  words. 

"When  Spring  comes  and  the  snow  melts 
so  that  I  know  he  could  get  out,  I  can 
hardly  stand  it.  You  know  I  was  once  in 
the  Insane  Asylum  for  three  years  at  a 
stretch,  and  since  then  I  haven't  had  much 
use  of  my  mind  except  to  worry  with.     Of 


20v'8'72 


38      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

course  I  know  that  it  is  dangerous  for  me, 
but  what  can  I  do  ?  I  think  something 
like  this:  'The  snow  is  melting,  now  he 
could  get  out,  but  his  officers  won't  let 
him  off  and  if  he  runs  away  he'll  be  shot 
for  a  deserter  —  either  way  I'll  never  see 
him  again  ;  I'll  die  without  seeing  him'  — 
and  then  I  begin  all  over  again  with  the 
snow."  After  a  pause,  she  said :  "The 
recruiting  officer  ought  not  to  have  taken 
him,  he's  my  only  son  and  I'm  a  widow. 
It's  against  the  rules,  but  he  was  so  crazy 
to  go  that  I  guess  he  lied  a  little  —  at  any 
rate,  the  government  has  him  now  and  I 
can't  get  him  back.  Without  this  worry 
about  him  my  mind  would  be  all  right ; 
if  he  were  here  he  would  be  earning  money 
and  keeping  me  and  we  would  be  happy  all 
day  long." 

Recalling  the  vagabondish  lad,  who  had 
never  earned  much  money  and  had  cer- 
tainly never  "kept"  his  hard-working 
mother,  I  ventured  to  suggest  that,  even 
if  he  were  at  home,  he  might  not  have  work 
these  hard  times,  that  he  might  get  into 
trouble  and  be  arrested  —  I  did  not  need 


REACTING   ON   LIFE  39 

to  remind  her  that  he  had  already  been 
arrested  twice  —  that  he  was  now  fed  and 
shehered  and  under  disciphne,  and  I  added 
hopefully  something  about  his  seeing  the 
world.  She  looked  at  me  out  of  her  with- 
drawn, harried  eyes,  as  if  I  were  speaking 
a  foreign  tongue.  "  That  wouldn't  make 
any  real  difference  to  me  —  the  work,  the 
money,  his  behaving  well  and  all  that,  if  I 
could  cook  and  wash  for  him.  I  don't  need 
all  the  money  I  earn  scrubbing  that  factory. 
I  only  take  bread  and  tea  for  supper  and 
I  choke  over  that,  thinking  of  him." 

She  ceased  to  speak,  overcome  by  a 
thousand  obscure  emotions  which  could 
find  no  outlet  in  words.  She  dimly  real- 
ized that  the  facts  in  the  case,  to  one  who 
had  known  her  boy  from  childhood,  were 
far  from  creditable,  and  that  no  one  could 
understand  the  eternally  unappeased  ideal- 
ism which,  for  her,  surrounded  her  son's 
return.  She  was  even  afraid  to  say  much 
about  it,  lest  she  should  be  overmastered 
by  her  subject  and  be  considered  so  ir- 
rational as  to  suggest  a  return  to  the 
Hospital  for  the  Insane. 


40      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

Those  mothers  who  have  never  resisted 
fate  nor  buffeted  against  the  black  waters, 
but  have  allowed  the  waves  to  close  over 
them,  worn  and  bent  as  they  are  by  hard 
labor,  subdued  and  misshapen  by  the  bru- 
tality of  men,  are  at  least  unaffrighted  by 
the  melodramatic  coarseness  of  life,  which 
Stevenson  more  gently  describes  as  "the 
uncouth  and  outlandish  strain  in  the  web 
of  the  world."  The  story  of  the  Devil 
Baby  may  have  made  its  appeal  through 
its  frank  presentation  of  this  very  de- 
moniac quality,  to  those  who  live  under 
the  iron  tyranny  of  that  poverty  which 
threatens  starvation,  and  under  the  dread 
of  a  brutality  which  may  any  dark  night 
bring  them  or  their  children  to  extinction  ; 
to  those  who  have  seen  both  virtue  and 
vice  go  unrewarded  and  who  have  long 
since  ceased  to  explain. 

This  more  primitive  type  embodies  the 
eternal  patience  of  those  humble,  toiling 
women  who  through  the  generations  have 
been  held  of  little  value,  save  as  their 
drudgery  ministered  to  their  men.  One 
of  them  related  her  habit  of  going  through 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  41 

the  pockets  of  her  drunken  son  every  pay- 
day, and  complained  that  she  had  never 
found  so  httle  as  the  night  before,  only 
twenty-five  cents  out  of  fifteen  dollars  he 
had  promised  for  the  rent,  long  overdue. 
''I  had  to  get  that  as  he  lay  in  the  alley 
before  the  door ;  I  couldn't  pull  him  in, 
and  the  copper  who  helped  him  home, 
left  as  soon  as  he  heard  me  coming  and  pre- 
tended he  didn't  see  me.  I  have  no  food 
in  the  house,  nor  cofi^ee  to  sober  him  up 
with.  I  know  perfectly  well  that  you  will 
ask  me  to  eat  something  here,  but,  if  I 
can't  carry  it  home,  I  won't  take  a  bite 
nor  a  sup.  I  have  never  told  you  so  much 
before.  Since  one  of  the  nurses  said  he 
could  be  arrested  for  my  non-support,  I 
have  been  awful  close-mouthed.  It's  the 
foolish  way  all  the  women  in  our  street 
are  talking  about  the  Devil  Baby  that's 
loosened  my  tongue,  more  shame  to  me." 

A  sorrowful  woman  clad  in  heavy  black, 
who  came  one  day,  exhibited  such  a  capac- 
ity for  prolonged  weeping  that  it  was  evi- 
dence in  itself  of  the  truth  of  at  least  half 
her  statement,  that  she  had  cried  herself 


42      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

to  sleep  every  night  of  her  life  for  fourteen 
years  in  fulfilment  of  a  *' curse"  laid  upon 
her  by  an  angry  man,  that  "her  pillow 
would  be  wet  with  tears  as  long  as 
she  lived."  Her  respectable  husband  had 
a  shop  in  the  Red  Light  district  because 
he  found  it  profitable  to  sell  to  the  men 
and  women  who  lived  there.  She  had  kept 
house  in  the  room  over  the  *' store"  from 
the  time  she  was  a  bride  newly  come  from 
Russia,  and  her  five  daughters  had  been 
born  there,  but  never  a  son  to  gladden  her 
husband's  heart. 

She  took  such  a  feverish  interest  in  the 
Devil  Baby  that,  when  I  was  obliged  to 
disillusion  her,  I  found  it  hard  to  take 
away  her  comfort  in  the  belief  that  the 
Powers  that  Be  are  on  the  side  of  the 
woman  when  her  husband  resents  too 
many  daughters.  But,  after  all,  the  birth 
of  daughters  was  but  an  incident  in  her 
tale  of  unmitigated  woe,  for  the  scoldings 
of  a  disappointed  husband  were  as  nothing 
to  the  curse  of  a  strange  enemy,  although 
she  doubtless  had  a  confused  impression 
that  if  there  were  retribution  for  one  in 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  43 

the  general  scheme  of  things,  there  might 
be  for  the  other.  When  the  weeping  woman 
finally  put  the  events  of  her  disordered  life 
in  some  sort  of  sequence,  it  became  clear 
that  about  fifteen  years  ago  she  had  re- 
ported to  the  police  a  vicious  house  whose 
back  door  opened  into  her  own  yard.  Her 
husband  had  forbidden  her  to  do  anything 
about  it  and  had  said  that  it  would  only 
get  them  into  trouble,  but  she  had  been 
made  desperate  one  day  when  she  saw  her 
little  girl,  then  twelve  years  old,  come  out 
of  the  door,  gleefully  showing  her  younger 
sister  a  present  of  money.  Because  the 
poor  woman  had  tried  for  ten  years  without 
success  to  induce  her  husband  to  move 
from  the  vicinity  of  such  houses,  she  was 
certain  that  she  could  save  her  child  only 
by  forcing  out  "the  bad  people"  from  her 
own  door  yard.  She  therefore  made  her 
one  frantic  effort,  found  her  way  to  the 
city  hall  and  there  reported  the  house  to 
the  chief  himself.  Of  course,  "the  bad 
people  stood  in  with  the  police"  and 
nothing  happened  to  them  save,  perhaps, 
a  fresh  levy  of  blackmail,  but  the  keeper 


44      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

of  the  house,  beside  himself  with  rage, 
made  the  dire  threat  and  laid  the  curse 
upon  her.  In  less  than  a  year  from  that 
time  he  had  enticed  her  daughter  into  a 
disreputable  house  in  another  part  of  the 
district.  The  poor  woman,  ringing  one  door- 
bell after  another,  had  never  been  able  to 
find  her,  but  her  sisters,  who  in  time  came 
to  know  where  she  was,  had  been  dazzled 
by  her  mode  of  life.  The  weeping  mother 
was  quite  sure  that  two  of  her  daughters, 
while  still  outwardly  respectable  and 
"working  downtown,"  earned  money  in 
the  devious  ways  which  they  had  learned 
all  about  when  they  were  little  children, 
although  for  the  past  five  years  the  now 
prosperous  husband  had  allowed  the  family 
to  live  in  a  suburb,  where  the  two  younger 
daughters  were  *' growing  up  respectable." 
Certain  of  the  visitors,  although  con- 
fronted by  those  mysterious  and  impersonal 
wrongs  which  are  apparently  inherent  in  the 
very  nature  of  things,  gave  us  glimpses  of 
another  sort  of  wisdom  than  that  expressed 
in  the  assumptions  that  the  decrees  of  Fate 
are  immutable. 


REACTING   ON   LIFE  45 

Such  a  glimpse  came  to  me  through  a 
conversation  with  a  woman  whose  fine 
mind  and  indomitable  spirit  I  had  long 
admired  ;  I  had  known  her  for  years,  and 
yet  the  recital  of  her  sufferings,  added  to 
those  the  Devil  Baby  had  already  induced 
other  women  to  tell  me,  pierced  me  afresh. 
The  story  of  the  Devil  Baby  may  have 
incited  these  women  to  put  their  experiences 
more  vividly  than  they  had  hitherto  been 
able  to  do.  It  may  have  been  because 
they  were  unconsciously  spurred  by  the 
hope  that  a  supernatural  retribution  might 
intervene  even  for  them,  or  because  they 
were  merely  comforted  by  the  knowledge 
that  it  had  once  done  so  for  some  one  else 
that  they  spoke  with  more  confidence  than 
they  had  ever  done  before. 

"I  had  eleven  children,  some  born  in 
Hungary  and  some  born  here,  nine  of 
them  boys  ;  all  of  the  children  died  when 
they  were  little  but  my  dear  Liboucha. 
You  know  all  about  her.  She  died  last 
winter  in  the  Insane  Asylum.  She  was  only 
twelve  years  old  when  her  father,  in  a  fit 
of  delirium   tremens,   killed   himself    after 


46      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

he  had  chased  us  around  the  room,  trying 
to  kill  us  first.  She  saw  it  all,  the  blood 
splashed  on  the  wall  stayed  in  her  mind 
the  worst ;  she  shivered  and  shook  all  that 
night  through,  and  the  next  morning  she 
had  lost  her  voice,  couldn't  speak  out 
loud  for  terror.  After  a  while  she  went  to 
school  again  and  her  voice  came  back,  al- 
though it  was  never  very  natural.  She 
seemed  to  do  as  well  as  ever  and  was  awful 
pleased  when  she  got  into  High  School. 
All  the  money  we  had  I  earned  scrubbing 
in  a  public  dispensary,  although  sometimes 
I  got  a  little  more  by  interpreting  for  the 
patients,  for  I  know  three  languages,  one 
as  well  as  the  other.  But  I  was  deter- 
mined that  whatever  happened  to  me, 
Liboucha  was  to  be  educated.  My  hus- 
band's father  was  a  doctor  in  the  old  coun- 
try, and  Liboucha  was  always  a  clever 
child.  I  wouldn't  have  her  live  the  kind 
of  life  I  had,  with  no  use  for  my  mind  ex- 
cept to  make  me  restless  and  bitter.  I  was 
pretty  old  and  worn  out  for  such  hard 
work,  but  when  I  used  to  see  Liboucha  on 
a  Sunday  morning  ready  for  church  in  her 


REACTING   ON   LIFE  47 

white  dress,  with  her  long  yellow  hair 
braided  round  her  beautiful  pale  face,  ly- 
ing there  in  bed  as  I  was,  being  brought 
up  a  free-thinker,  and  needing  to  rest  my 
aching  bones  for  the  next  week's  work, 
I'd  feel  almost  happy,  in  spite  of  every- 
thing. But  of  course  no  such  peace  could 
last  in  my  life  ;  the  second  year  at  High 
School  Liboucha  began  to  seem  different 
and  to  do  strange  things.  You  know  the 
time  she  wandered  away  for  three  days  and 
we  were  all  v^^ild  with  fright,  although  a 
kind  woman  had  taken  her  in  and  no  harm 
came  to  her.  I  could  never  be  easy  after 
that ;  she  was  always  gentle,  but  she  was 
awful  sly  about  running  away  and  at  last 
I  had  to  send  her  to  the  asylum.  She 
stayed  there  off  and  on  for  five  years,  but 
I  saw  her  every  week  of  my  life  and  she 
was  always  company  for  me,  what  with 
sewing  for  her,  washing  and  ironing  her 
clothes,  cooking  little  things  to  take  out 
to  her,  and  saving  a  bit  of  money  to  buy 
fruit  for  her.  At  any  rate,  I  had  stopped 
feeling  so  bitter,  and  got  some  comfort  out 
of  seeing  the  one  thing  that  belonged  to 


48      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

me  on  this  side  of  the  water,  when  all  of  a 
sudden  she  died  of  heart  failure  and  they 
never  took  the  trouble  to  send  for  me  until 
the  next  day." 

She  stopped  as  if  wondering  afresh  that 
the  Fates  could  have  been  so  casual,  but 
with  a  sudden  illumination,  as  if  she  had 
been  awakened  out  of  the  burden  and 
intensity  of  her  restricted  personal  inter- 
ests into  a  consciousness  of  those  larger 
relations  that  are,  for  the  most  part,  so 
strangely  invisible.  It  was  as  if  the  young 
mother  of  the  grotesque  Devil  Baby,  that 
victim  of  wrong  doing  on  the  part  of 
others,  had  revealed  to  this  tragic  woman 
much  more  clearly  than  soft  words  had 
ever  done,  that  the  return  of  a  deed  of 
violence  upon  the  head  of  the  innocent  is 
inevitable ;  as  if  she  had  realized  that,  al- 
though she  was  destined  to  walk  all  the 
days  of  her  life  with  the  piteous  multitude 
who  bear  the  undeserved  wrongs  of  the 
world,  she  would  walk  henceforth  with  a 
sense  of  companionship. 

At  moments  it  seemed  possible  that  these 
simple  women,  representing  an  earlier  de- 


REACTING   ON    LIFE  49 

velopment,  eagerly  seized  upon  the  story 
because  it  was  primitive  in  form  and  sub- 
stance. Certainly,  one  evening,  a  long- 
forgotten  ballad  made  an  unceasing  effort 
to  come  to  the  surface  of  my  mind  as  I 
talked  to  a  feeble  woman  who,  in  the  last 
stages  of  an  incurable  disease  from  which 
she  soon  afterwards  died,  had  been  helped 
off  the  street  car  in  front  of  Hull-House. 
The  ballad  tells  how  the  lover  of  a  proud 
and  jealous  mistress,  who  demanded  as  a 
final  test  of  devotion  that  he  bring  her  the 
heart  of  his  mother,  had  quickly  cut  the 
heart  from  his  mother's  breast  and  impetu- 
ously returned  to  his  lady,  bearing  it  upon 
a  salver ;  and  how,  when  stumbling  in  his 
gallant  haste,  he  stooped  to  replace  upon 
the  silver  plate  his  mother's  heart,  which 
had  rolled  to  the  ground,  the  heart,  still 
beating  with  tender  solicitude,  whispered 
the  hope  that  her  child  was  not  hurt.  The 
ballad  itself  was  scarcely  more  exaggerated 
than  the  story  of  our  visitor  that  evening, 
who  had  made  the  desperate  effort  of  a 
journey  from  home  in  order  to  see  the 
Devil  Baby.     I  was  familiar  with  her  vicis- 


50     LONG    ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

situdes ;  the  shiftless,  drinking  husband 
and  the  large  family  of  children,  all  of  whom 
had  brought  her  sorrow  and  disgrace,  and  I 
knew  that  her  heart's  desire  was  to  see 
again,  before  she  died,  her  youngest  son, 
who  was  a  life  prisoner  in  the  penitentiary. 
She  was  confident  that  the  last  piteous 
stage  of  her  disease  would  secure  him  a 
week's  parole,  founding  this  forlorn  hope 
upon  the  fact  that  "they  sometimes  let 
them  out  to  attend  a  mother's  funeral, 
and  perhaps  they'd  let  Joe  come  a  few 
days  ahead ;  he  could  pay  his  fare  after- 
wards from  the  insurance  money.  It 
wouldn't  take  much  to  bury  me."  Again 
we  went  over  the  hideous  story :  Joe  had 
violently  quarrelled  with  a  woman,  the 
proprietor  of  the  house  in  which  his  dis- 
reputable wife  was  living,  because  she  had 
withheld  from  him  a  part  of  his  wife's 
"earnings,"  and  in  the  altercation  had 
killed  her  —  a  situation,  one  would  say, 
which  it  would  be  difficult  for  even  a  mother 
to  condone.  But  not  at  all,  her  thin  gray 
face  worked  with  emotion,  her  trembling 
hands  restlessly  pulled  at  her  shabby  skirt 


REACTING    ON    LIFE  51 

as  the  hands  of  the  dying  pluck  at  their 
sheets,  but  she  put  all  the  vitality  she 
could  muster  into  his  defence.  She  told 
us  he  had  legally  married  the  girl,  who  sup- 
ported him,  "although  Lily  had  been  so 
long  in  that  life  that  few  men  would  have 
done  it.  Of  course,  such  a  girl  must  have 
a  protector  or  everybody  would  fleece  her. 
Poor  Lily  said  to  the  day  of  her  death  that 
he  was  the  kindest  man  she  ever  knew,  and 
treated  her  the  whitest ;  that  she  herself 
was  to  blame  for  the  murder  because  she 
told  on  the  old  miser,  and  Joe  was  so  hot- 
headed she  might  have  known  that  he 
would  draw  a  gun  for  her."  The  gasping 
mother  concluded:  ''He  was  always  that 
handsome  and  had  such  a  way.  One 
winter,  when  I  was  scrubbing  in  an  office 
building,  I'd  never  get  home  much  before 
twelve  o'clock,  but  Joe  would  open  the 
door  for  me  just  as  pleasant  as  if  he  hadn't 
been  waked  out  of  a  sound  sleep."  She 
was  so  triumphantly  unconscious  of  the 
incongruity  of  a  sturdy  son  in  bed  while 
his  mother  earned  his  food,  that  her  audi- 
tors said  never  a  word,  and  in  silence  we 


52      LONG    ROAD    OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

saw  a  hero  evolved  before  our  eyes,  a  de- 
fender of  the  oppressed,  the  best  beloved  of 
his  mother,  who  was  losing  his  high  spirits 
and  eating  his  heart  out  behind  prison 
bars.  He  could  well  defy  the  world  even 
there,  surrounded  as  he  was  by  that  invin- 
cible affection  which  assures  both  the  for- 
tunate and  unfortunate  alike  that  we  are 
loved,  not  according  to  our  deserts,  but  in 
response  to  some  profounder  law. 

This  imposing  revelation  of  maternal 
solicitude  was  an  instance  of  what  con- 
tinually happened  in  connection  with  the 
Devil  Baby.  In  the  midst  of  the  most 
tragic  reminiscences,  there  remained  that 
something  in  the  memories  of  these  mothers 
which  has  been  called  the  great  revelation 
of  tragedy,  or  sometimes  the  great  illusion 
of  tragedy ;  that  which  has  power  in  its 
own  right  to  make  life  palatable  and  at 
rare  moments  even  beautiful. 


CHAPTER  III 

women's    memories  —  DISTURBING    CON- 
VENTIONS 

In  sharp  contrast  to  the  function  of  woman's 
long  memory  as  a  reconciler  to  life,  revealed 
by  the  visitors  to  the  Devil  Baby,  are  those 
individual  reminiscences  which,  because 
they  force  the  possessor  to  challenge  exist- 
ing conventions,  act  as  a  reproach,  even  as 
a  social  disturber.  When  these  reminis- 
cences, based  upon  the  diverse  experi- 
ences of  many  people  unknown  to  each 
other,  point  to  one  inevitable  conclusion, 
they  accumulate  into  a  social  protest, 
although  not  necessarily  an  effective  one, 
against  existing  conventions,  even  against 
those  which  are  most  valuable  and  those 
securely  founded  upon  cumulative  human 
wisdom.  But  because  no  conventional- 
ized tradition  is  perfect,  however  good  its 
intent,  most  of  them  become  challenged  in 

53 


54      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

course  of  time,  unwittingly  illustrating  the 
contention  that  great  social  changes  are 
often  brought  about  less  by  the  thinkers 
than  by  "a  certain  native  and  indepen- 
dent rationalism  operating  in  great  masses 
of  men  and  women." 

The  statement  is  well  founded  that  a 
convention  is  at  its  best,  not  when  it  is 
universally  accepted,  but  just  when  it  is 
being  so  challenged  and  broken  that  the 
conformists  are  obliged  to  defend  it  and 
to  fight  for  it  against  those  who  would 
destroy  it.  Both  the  defenders  of  an  old 
custom  and  its  opponents  are  then  driven 
to  a  searching  of  their  own  hearts. 

Such  searching  and  sifting  is  taking 
place  in  the  consciences  of  many  women  of 
this  generation  whose  sufferings,  although 
strikingly  influencing  conduct,  are  seldom 
expressed  in  words  until  they  are  told  in 
the  form  of  reminiscence  after  the  edges 
have  been  long  since  dulled.  Such  suffer- 
ings are  never  so  poignant  as  when  women 
have  been  forced  by  their  personal  experi- 
ences to  challenge  the  valuable  conventions 
safeguarding  family  life. 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  55 

A  woman  whom  I  had  known  sHghtly 
for  many  years  came  to  Hull-House  one  day 
escorted  by  her  little  grandson.  Her  delicate 
features,  which  were  rather  hard  and  severe, 
softened  most  charmingly  as  the  little  boy 
raised  his  cap  in  good-by  from  the  vanish- 
ing automobile.  In  reply  to  my  admiring 
comment  upon  the  sturdy  lad  and  his  af- 
fectionate relation  to  her,  she  startled  me 
by  saying  abruptly,  "You  know  he  is 
really  not  my  grandson.  I  have  scarcely 
admitted  the  doubt  before,  but  the  time 
is  coming  when  I  must  face  it  and  de- 
cide his  future.  If  you  are  kind  enough 
to  listen,  I  want  to  tell  you  my  experience 
in  all  its  grim  sorrow. 

"My  husband  was  shot  twenty-seven 
years  ago,  under  very  disgraceful  circum- 
stances, in  a  disreputable  quarter  of  Paris  ; 
you  may  remember  something  of  it  in  the 
newspapers,  although  they  meant  to  be 
considerate.  I  was  left  with  my  little  son, 
and  with  such  a  horror  of  self-indulgence 
and  its  consequences,  that  I  determined  to 
rear  my  child  in  strict  sobriety,  chastity, 
and   self-restraint,  although    all   else  were 


56      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

sacrificed  to  it.  Through  his  school  and 
college  days,  which  I  took  care  should  be 
far  from  his  father's  friends  and  associations, 
I  always  lived  with  him,  so  bent  on  recti- 
tude and  so  distressed  by  any  lack  of  self- 
control  that  I  see  now  how  hard  and 
rigorous  his  life  must  have  been.  I  meant 
to  sacrifice  myself  for  my  child,  in  reality 
I  sacrificed  him  to  my  narrow  code. 

"The  very  June  that  he  took  his  master's 
degree,  I  myself  found  him,  one  beautiful 
morning,  lying  dead  in  his  own  room,  shot 
through  the  temple.  No  one  had  heard 
the  report  of  the  revolver,  for  the  little 
house  we  had  taken  was  so  on  the  edge  of 
the  college  town  that  the  neighbors  were 
rather  remote,  and  he  must  have  killed 
himself  while  I  sat  in  the  moonlight,  on  the 
garden  bench,  after  he  had  left  me,  my 
mind  still  filled  with  plans  for  his  future. 

"I  have  gone  over  every  word  of  our 
conversation  that  evening  in  the  garden  a 
thousand  times  ;  we  were  planning  to  come 
to  Chicago  for  his  medical  course,  and  I 
had  expressed  my  exultant  confidence  in 
him  to  withstand  whatever  temptation  a 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  57 

city  might  offer,  my  pride  in  his  purity  of 
thought,  his  rectitude  of  conduct.  It  was 
then  he  rose  rather  abruptly  and  went  into 
the  house  to  write  the  letter  to  me  which 
I  found  on  his  table  next  morning.  In 
that  letter  he  told  me  that  he  was  too  vile 
to  live  any  longer,  that  he  had  sinned  not 
only  against  his  own  code  of  decency  and 
honor,  but  against  my  lifelong  standards 
and  teachings,  and  that  he  realized  per- 
fectly that  I  could  never  forgive  him. 
He  evidently  did  not  expect  any  under- 
standing from  me,  either  for  himself  or  for 
*the  young  and  innocent  girl'  about  to  be- 
come the  mother  of  his  child,  and  in  his 
interpretation  of  my  rigid  morals  he  was 
quite  sure  that  I  would  never  consent  to 
see  her,  but  he  wrote  me  that  he  had  told 
her  to  send  the  little  baby  to  me  as  soon 
as  it  was  born,  obviously  hoping  that  I 
might  be  tender  to  the  innocent,  although 
I  was  so  harsh  and  unpitying  to  the  guilty. 
I  had  apparently  never  given  him  a  glimpse 
beyond  my  unbending  sternness,  and  he  had 
all  unwittingly  pronounced  me  too  self- 
righteous  for  forgiveness  ;    at  any  rate,  he 


58      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

faced   death   rather  than   my   cold   disap- 
probation. 

"The  girl  is  still  leading  the  life  she  had 
led  for  two  years  before  my  son  met  her. 
She  is  glad  to  have  her  child  cared  for  and 
hopes  that  I  will  make  him  my  heir,  but 
understands,  of  course,  that  his  paternity 
could  never  be  established  in  court.  So 
here  I  am,  old  and  hard,  beginning  again 
the  perilous  experiment  of  rearing  a  man 
child.  I  suppose  it  was  inevitable  that  I 
should  hold  the  girl  responsible  for  my  son's 
downfall  and  for  his  death.  She  was  one 
of  the  wretched  young  women  who  live 
in  college  towns  for  the  express  purpose 
of  inveigling  young  men,  often  deliberately 
directing  their  efforts  toward  those  who 
are  reputed  to  have  money.  I  discovered 
all  sorts  of  damaging  facts  about  her,  which 
enabled  me  to  exonerate  my  son  from  in- 
tentional wrong-doing,  and  to  think  quite 
honestly  that  he  had  been  lured  and 
tempted  beyond  his  strength.  The  girl 
was  obliged  to  leave  the  little  town,  which 
was  filled  with  the  horror  and  scandal  of 
the  occurrence,  but  even  then,  in  that  first 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  59 

unbridled  public  censure  against  the  *bad 
woman'  who  had  been  discovered  in  the 
midst  of  virtuous  surroundings,  there  was 
a  tendency  to  hold  me  accountable  for  my 
son's  death,  whatever  the  girl's  earlier 
responsibility  may  have  been. 

"  In  my  loathing  of  her  I  experienced  all 
over  again  the  harsh  and  bitter  judgments 
through  which  I  had  lived  in  the  first  years 
after  my  husband's  death.  I  had  secretly 
held  the  unknown  woman  responsible  for  his 
end,  but  of  course  it  never  occurred  to  me 
to  find  out  about  her,  and  I  certainly  could 
never  have  brought  myself  to  hear  her 
name,  much  less  to  see  her.  I  have  at 
least  done  better  than  that  in  regard  to 
the  mother  of  my  *  grandson,'  and  Heaven 
knows  I  have  tried  in  all  humility  and 
heartbreak  to  help  her.  She  fairly  hated 
me,  as  she  did  anything  that  reminded  her 
of  my  son  —  the  entire  episode  had  seemed 
to  her  so  unnatural,  so  monstrous,  so  un- 
necessary —  she  considered  me  his  mur- 
derer, and  I  never  had  the  courage  to  tell 
her  that  I  agreed  with  her.  Perhaps  if  I 
had  done  that,  really  abased  myself  as  I 


6o      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

was  willing  she  should  be  abased,  we  might 
have  come  into  some  sort  of  genuine  re- 
lation born  of  our  companionship  in  trag- 
edy. But  I  couldn't  do  that,  possibly 
because  the  women  of  my  generation  can- 
not easily  change  the  traditional  attitude 
towards  what  the  Bible  calls  'the  harlot/ 
At  any  rate,  I  didn't  succeed  in  'saving' 
her.  She  so  obviously  dreaded  seeing  me, 
and  our  strained  visits  were  so  unsatis- 
factory and  painful,  that  I  finally  gave  it 
up,  and  her  son  has  apparently  quite  for- 
gotten her.  I  am  sure  she  tries  to  forget 
him  and  all  the  tragic  scenes  associated 
with  his  earliest  babyhood,  when  I  in- 
sisted not  only  upon  'keeping  mother  and 
child  together'  but  also  on  keeping  them 
with  me." 

After  a  moment's  pause  she  resumed : 
"It  would  have  been  comparatively  easy 
for  me  to  die  when  my  child  was  little, 
when  I  still  had  a  right  to  believe  that  he 
would  grow  up  to  be  a  good  and  useful 
man,  but  I  lived  to  see  him  driven  to  his 
death  by  my  own  stupidity.  I  have  en- 
countered the  full  penalty  for  breaking  the 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  6i 

commandment  to  judge  not.  I  passed 
sentence  without  hearing  the  evidence  ;  I 
gave  up  the  traditional  role  of  the  woman 
who  loves  and  pities  and  tries  to  under- 
stand ;  I  forgot  that  it  was  my  mission  to 
save  and  not  to  judge. 

"As  I  have  gone  back  over  my  unmiti- 
gated failure  again  and  again,  I  am  sure 
at  last  that  it  was  the  sorry  result  of  my 
implacable  judgment  of  the  woman  I  held 
responsible  for  my  husband's  sin.  I  did 
not  realize  the  danger  nor  the  inevitable 
recoil  of  such  a  state  of  self-righteousness 
upon  my  child." 

As  she  paused  in  the  recital  I  rashly 
anticipated  the  conclusion,  that  her  bitter 
experiences  had  brought  the  whole  question 
to  that  tribunal  of  personal  conduct  whose 
concrete  findings  stir  us  to  our  very  mar- 
row with  shame  and  remorse  ;  that  she  had 
frantically  striven  as  we  all  do,  to  keep  her- 
self from  falling  into  the  pit  where  the 
demons  of  self-reproach  dwell,  by  clinging 
to  the  conventional  judgments  of  the 
world.  I  expected  her  to  set  them  forth 
at  great  length  in  self-justification,  and  per- 


62      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

haps,  belonging,  as  she  so  obviously  did,  to 
an  older  school,  she  might  even  assure  me 
that  the  wrong  to  those  to  whom  it  was 
now  impossible  to  make  reparation  had 
forever  lifted  her  above  committing  another 
such  injustice.  I  found,  however,  that  I 
was  absolutely  mistaken  and  that  whatever 
might  be  true  of  her,  it  still  lay  within  me 
to  commit  a  gross  injustice,  when  she  re- 
sumed with  these  words  :  "It  is  a  long  time 
since  I  ceased  to  urge  in  my  own  defence 
that  I  was  but  reflecting  the  attitude  of 
society,  for,  in  my  efforts  to  get  at  the  root 
of  the  matter  I  have  been  convinced  that 
the  conventional  attitude  cannot  be  de- 
fended, certainly  not  upon  religious 
grounds." 

She  stopped  as  if  startled  by  her  own 
reflections  upon  the  subject  of  the  social 
ostracism  so  long  established  and  so  harshly 
enforced  that  women  seem  to  hold  to  it  as 
through  an  instinct  of  self-preservation. 

She  was,  perhaps,  dimly  conscious  that 
the  tradition  that  the  unchaste  woman 
should  be  an  outcast  from  society  rests 
upon  a  solid  basis  of  experience,  upon  the 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  63 

long  struggle  of  a  multitude  of  obscure 
women  who,  from  one  generation  to  another, 
were  frantically  determined  to  establish  the 
paternity  of  their  children  and  to  force  the 
father  to  a  recognition  of  his  obligations  ; 
and  that  the  living  representatives  of  these 
women  instinctively  rise  up  in  honest  re- 
bellion against  any  attempt  to  loosen  the 
social  control  which  such  efforts  have  es- 
tablished, bungling  and  cruel  though  the 
control  may  be. 

Further  conversation  showed  that  she 
also  realized  that  these  stern  memories 
inherited  from  the  past  have  an  undoubted 
social  value  and  that  it  is  a  perilous  under- 
taking upon  which  certain  women  of  this 
generation  are  bent  in  their  efforts  to  deal 
a  belated  justice  to  the  fallen  woman.  It 
involves  a  clash  within  the  very  mass  of 
inherited  motives  and  impulses  as  well  as 
a  clash  between  old  conventions  and  con- 
temporary principles.  On  the  other  hand, 
it  must  have  been  obvious  to  her  in  her 
long  effort  to  get  at  *'the  root  of  the  mat- 
ter" that  the  punishment  and  hatred  of 
the  bad  woman  has  gone  so  far  as  to  over- 


64      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

reach  its  own  purpose ;  it  has  become  re- 
sponsible for  such  hardness  of  heart  on  the 
part  of  "respectable"  women  towards  the 
so-called  fallen  ones,  that  punishment  is 
often  inflicted  not  only  without  regard  to 
justice,  but  in  order  to  feed  the  spiritual 
pride,  "I  am  holier  than  thou."  Such 
pride  erects  veritable  barricades,  deliber- 
ately shutting  out  sympathetic  understand- 
ing. 

The  very  fact  that  women  remain  closer 
to  type  than  men  do  and  are  more  swayed 
by  the  past,  makes  it  difficult  for  them  to 
defy  settled  conventions.  It  adds  to  their 
difficulty  that  the  individual  women, 
driven  to  modify  a  harsh  convention  which 
has  become  unendurable  to  them,  are  per- 
force those  most  sensitive  to  injustice.  The 
sharp  struggle  for  social  advance,  which  is 
always  a  struggle  between  ideas,  long  be- 
fore it  becomes  embodied  in  contending 
social  groups,  may  thus  find  its  arena  in 
the  tender  conscience  of  one  woman  who 
is  pitilessly  rent  and  pierced  by  her  war- 
ring scruples  and  affections.  Even  such  a 
tentative  effort  in  the   direction   of  social 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  65 

advance  exacts  the  usual  toll  of  blood  and 
tears. 

Fortunately  the  entire  burden  of  the 
attempt  to  modify  a  convention  which 
has  become  unsupportable,  by  no  means 
rests  solely  upon  such  self-conscious  women. 
Their  analytical  efforts  are  steadily  sup- 
plemented by  instinctive  conduct  on  the 
part  of  many  others.  A  great  mass  of 
"variation  from  type/*  accelerating  this 
social  change,  is  contributed  by  simple 
mothers  who  have  been  impelled  by  the 
same  primitive  emotion  which  the  Devil 
Baby  had  obviously  released  in  so  many 
old  women.  This  is  an  overwhelming  pity 
and  sense  of  tender  comprehension,  doubt- 
less closely  related  to  the  compunction 
characteristic  of  all  primitive  people  which 
in  the  earliest  stage  of  social  development 
long  performed  the  first  rude  offices  of  a 
sense  of  justice.  This  early  trait  is  still  a 
factor  in  the  social  struggle,  for  as  has  often 
been  pointed  out,  our  social  state  is  like  a 
countryside — of  a  complex  geological  struc- 
ture, with  outcrops  of  strata  of  very  diverse 
ages. 


66      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

Such  compunction  sometimes  carries  the 
grandmother  of  an  illegitimate  child  to  the 
point  of  caring  for  the  child  when  she  is 
still  utterly  unable  to  forgive  her  daughter, 
the  child's  mother.  Even  that  is  a  step 
in  advance  from  the  time  when  the 
daughter  was  driven  from  the  house  and 
her  child,  because  a  bastard,  was  con- 
scientiously treated  as  an  outcast  both  by 
the  family  and  by  the  community. 

Such  an  instance  of  compunction  was 
recently  brought  to  my  attention  when 
Hull-House  made  an  effort  to  place  a  sub- 
normal little  girl  twelve  years  old  in  an 
institution  in  order  that  she  might  be  pro- 
tected from  certain  designing  men  in  the 
neighborhood.  The  grandmother  who  had 
always  taken  care  of  her  savagely  opposed 
the  effort  step  by  step.  She  had  scrubbed 
the  lavatories  in  a  public  building  during 
the  twenty-five  years  of  her  widowhood, 
and  because  she  worked  all  day  had  been 
unable  to  protect  her  own  feeble-minded 
daughter  who,  when  barely  fifteen  years 
old,  had  become  the  mother  of  this  child. 
When  her  granddaughter  was  finally  placed 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  d'j 

in  the  institution,  the  old  woman  was  ab- 
solutely desolated.  She  found  it  almost 
impossible  to  return  home  after  her  day's 
work  because  *'it  was  too  empty  and  lone- 
some, and  nothing  to  come  back  for. 
You  see,"  she  explained,  ''my  youngest 
boy  wasn't  right  in  his  head  either  and  kept 
his  bed  for  the  last  fifteen  years  of  his  life. 
During  all  that  time  I  took  care  of  him  the 
way  one  does  of  a  baby,  and  I  hurried  home 
every  night  with  my  heart  in  my  mouth 
until  I  saw  that  he  was  all  right.  He  died 
the  year  this  little  girl  was  born  and  she 
kind  of  took  his  place.  I  kept  her  in  a 
day  nursery  while  she  was  little,  and  when 
she  was  seven  years  old  the  ladies  there 
sent  her  to  school  in  one  of  the  subnormal 
rooms  and  let  her  come  back  to  the  nursery 
for  her  meals.  I  thought  she  was  getting 
along  all  right  and  I  took  care  never  to  let 
her  go  near  her  mother."  The  old  woman 
made  it  quite  clear  that  this  was  because 
her  daughter  was  keeping  house  with  a  man 
with  whom  there  had  been  no  marriage 
ceremony.  In  her  simple  code,  to  go  to 
such    a    house    would    be    to    connive    at 


68      LONG    ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

sin,  and  while  she  was  grateful  that  the 
man  had  established  a  control  over  her 
daughter  which  she  herself  had  never  been 
able  to  obtain,  she  always  referred  to  her 
daughter  as  "fallen,"  although  no  one  knew 
better  than  she  how  unguarded  the  girl  had 
been.  As  I  saw  how  singularly  free  this 
mother  was  from  self-reproach  and  how 
untouched  by  any  indecisions  or  remorses 
for  the  past,  I  was  once  more  impressed  by 
the  strength  of  the  stout  habits  acquired 
by  those  who  early  become  accustomed  to 
fight  off  black  despair.  Such  habits  stand 
them  in  good  stead  in  old  age,  and  at  least 
protect  them  from  those  pensive  regrets 
and  inconsolable  sorrows  which  inevitably 
tend  to  surround  whatever  has  once  made 
for  early  happiness,  as  soon  as  it  has  ceased 
to  exist. 

Many  individual  instances  are  found  in 
which  a  woman,  hard  pressed  by  life,  in- 
cludes within  her  tenderness  the  mother  of 
an  illegitimate  child.  A  most  striking  ex- 
ample of  this  came  to  me  through  a  woman 
whom  I  knew  years  ago  when  she  daily 
brought   her   three   children   to   the   Hull- 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  69 

House  day  nursery,  obliged  to  support 
them  by  her  work  in  a  neighboring  laundry 
because  her  husband  had  deserted  her.  I 
recall  her  fatuous  smile  as  she  used  to  say 
that  "Tommy  is  so  pleased  to  see  me  at 
night  that  I  can  hear  him  shout  'Hello, 
ma'  when  I  am  a  block  away."  I  had 
known  Tommy  through  many  years  ;  peri- 
ods of  adversity  when  his  father  was  away 
were  succeeded  by  periods  of  fitful  pros- 
perity when  his  father  returned  from  his 
wanderings  with  the  circus  with  which  "he 
could  always  find  work,"  because  he  had 
once  been  a  successful  acrobat  and  later  a 
clown,  and  "so  could  turn  his  hand  to  any- 
thing that  was  needed." 

Perhaps  it  was  unavoidable  that  Tommy 
should  have  made  his  best  friends  among 
the  warm-hearted  circus  people  who  were 
very  kind  to  him  after  his  father's  death, 
and  that  long  before  the  Child  Labor  Law 
permitted  him  to  sing  in  Chicago  saloons, 
he  was  doing  a  successful  business  singing 
in  the  towns  of  a  neighboring  state.  He 
was  a  droll  little  chap  "without  any  sense 
about  taking  care  of  himself,"  and  in  those 


yo      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

days  his  mother  not  only  missed  his  cheer- 
ful companionship  but  was  constantly 
anxious  about  his  health  and  morals. 
When  he  grew  older  and  became  a  profes- 
sional he  sent  his  mother  money  occasion- 
ally, although  never  very  much  and  never 
with  any  regularity.  She  was  always  so 
pleased  when  it  came  that  the  two  daughters 
supporting  her  with  their  steady  wages 
were  inclined  to  resent  her  obvious  grati- 
fication, as  they  did  the  killing  of  the 
fatted  calf  on  those  rare  occasions  when 
the  prodigal  returned  "between  seasons" 
to  visit  his  family. 

It  is  possible  that  his  mother  thus  early 
acquired  the  habit  of  defending  him,  the 
black  sheep,  against  the  strictures  of  the 
good  children  who  so  easily  become  the 
self-righteous  when  they  feel  "put  upon." 
However  that  may  be,  five  years  ago,  after 
one  daughter  had  been  married  to  a  skilled 
mechanic  and  the  other,  advanced  to  the 
position  of  a  forewoman,  was  supporting  her 
mother  in  the  comparative  idleness  of  keep- 
ing house  for  two  people  in  three  rooms, 
a  forlorn  girl  appeared  with  a  note  from 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  71 

Tommy  asking  his  mother  "to  help  her  out 
until  the  kid  came  and  she  could  work 
again." 

The  steady  daughter  would  not  permit 
"such  a  girl  to  cross  the  threshold,"  and 
the  little  household  was  finally  broken  up 
upon  the  issue.  The  daughter  went  to 
live  with  her  married  sister,  while  the 
mother,  having  moved  into  one  room  with 
"Tommy's  girl,"  went  back  to  the  laundry 
in  order  to  support  herself  and  her  guest. 

The  daughters,  having  impressively  told 
their  mother  that  she  could  come  to  live 
with  them  whenever  she  "was  willing  to 
come  alone,"  dropped  the  entire  situation. 
In  doing  this,  they  were  doubtless  in- 
stinctively responding  to  a  habit  acquired 
through  years  of  "keeping  clear  of  the 
queer  people  father  knew  in  the  circus  and 
the  saloon  crowds  always  hanging  around 
Tommy,"  in  their  secret  hope  to  come 
to  know  respectable  young  men.  Con- 
scious that  they  had  back  of  them  the 
opinion  of  all  righteous  people  they  could 
not  understand  why  their  mother,  for  the 
sake  of  a  bad  girl,  had  deserted  them  in 


72      LONG    ROAD    OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

this  praiseworthy  effort  in  which  hitherto 
she  had  been  the  prime  mover. 

Tommy  had  sent  his  "girl"  to  his  mother 
on  the  eve  of  his  departure  for  *'a  grand 
tour  to  the  Klondike  region,"  and  since 
then,  almost  four  years  ago,  she  has  heard 
nothing  further  from  him.  During  the 
first  half  of  the  time  the  two  women  strug- 
gled on  together  as  best  they  could,  sup- 
porting themselves  and  the  child  who  was 
brought  daily  to  the  nursery  by  his  grand- 
mother. But  the  pretty  little  mother,  grad- 
ually going  back  to  her  old  occupation  of 
dancing  in  the  vaudeville,  had  more  and 
more  out-of-town  engagements,  and  while 
she  always  divided  her  earnings  with  the 
baby,  the  grandmother  suspected  her  of 
losing  interest  in  him,  a  situation  which 
was  finally  explained  when  she  confessed 
that  she  was  about  to  be  married  to  a 
cabaret  manager  who  "knew  nothing  of 
the  past,"  and  to  beg  that  the  baby  might 
stay  where  he  was.  "Of  course,  I  will 
pay  board  for  him,  but  his  father  can  be 
made  to  do  something,  too,  if  we  can  only 
get  the  law  on  him." 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  73 

It  was  at  this  point  that  I  had  the  fol- 
lowing conversation  with  the  grandmother, 
who  was  shrewd  enough  to  see  that  the 
support  of  the  baby  was  being  left  upon 
her  hands,  and  that  she  could  expect  help 
from  neither  his  father  nor  his  mother,  al- 
though she  stoutly  refused  the  advice  that 
the  whole  matter  be  taken  into  the  Court 
of  Domestic  Relations.  "If  I  could  only 
see  Tommy  once  I  think  I  could  get  him  to 
help,  but  I  can't  find  out  where  he  is,  and 
he  may  not  be  alive  for  all  I  know ;  he  was 
always  that  careless  about  himself.  If  he 
put  on  a  new  red  necktie  he'd  never  know 
if  his  bare  toes  were  pushing  out  of  his  shoes. 
He  probably  didn't  get  proper  clothes  for 
'the  Klondike  region'  and  he  may  have 
been  frozen  to  death  before  this.  But 
whatever  has  happened  to  him,  I  can't 
let  his  baby  go.  I  suppose  I've  learned  to 
think  differently  about  some  things  after 
all  my  years  of  living  with  a  light-minded 
husband.  Maggie  came  to  see  me  last 
week,  for  she  means  to  be  a  good  daughter. 
She  said  that  Carrie  and  Joe  were  buying  a 
house  way  out  on  the  West  Side,  that  they 


74     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

were  going  to  move  into  it  this  month,  and 
that  she  and  I  could  have  a  nice  big  room 
together.  She  said,  too,  that  Carrie  would 
charge  only  half  rate  board  for  me,  and 
would  be  glad  to  have  my  help  with  her 
little  children,  for  they  both  think  that 
nobody  has  such  a  way  with  children  as 
I  have.  The  night  before,  when  she  and 
Carrie  were  playing  with  the  little  boys, 
they  remembered  some  of  the  funny  songs 
father  used  to  teach  Tommy,  and  how 
jolly  we  all  were  when  he  came  home  good- 
natured  and  would  stand  on  his  head  to 
make  the  candy  fall  out  of  his  pockets. 
I  know  the  two  girls  really  want  me  to  come 
back,  and  that  they  are  often  homesick, 
but  when  I  pointed  to  the  bed  where  the 
baby  was  and  asked,  'What  about  him.?' 
Maggie  turned  as  hard  as  nails  and  said  as 
quick  as  a  flash,  'We're  all  agreed  that 
you'll  have  to  put  him  in  an  institution. 
We'll  never  have  any  chance  with  the  nice 
people  in  a  swell  neighborhood  like  ours 
if  you  bring  the  baby.'  She  looked  real 
white  then,  and  I  felt  sorry  for  her  when 
she  said,  'Why,  they  might  even  think  he 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  75 

was  my  child,  you  never  can  tell/  although 
she  was  ashamed  of  that  afterwards  and 
cried  a  little  before  she  left.  She  told  me 
that  she  and  Carrie,  when  they  were  chil- 
dren, were  always  talking  of  what  they 
would  do  when  they  got  old  enough  to  work, 
how  they  would  take  care  of  me  and  move 
to  a  part  of  the  city  where  nobody  would 
know  anything  about  the  outlandish  way 
their  father  and  Tommy  used  to  carry  on. 
Of  course,  it  was  almost  telling  me  that 
they  didn't  want  me  to  come  to  see  them  if 
I  kept  the  baby." 

My  old  friend  was  quite  unable  to  for- 
mulate the  motives  which  underlay  her 
determination,  but  she  implied  that  cling- 
ing to  this  helpless  child  was  part  of  her 
unwavering  affection  for  her  son  when, 
without  any  preamble,  she  concluded  the 
conversation  with  the  remark,  "It's  the 
way  I  always  felt  about  him,"  as  if  further 
explanation  were  unnecessary. 

It  was  all  doubtless  a  manifestation  of 
Nature's  anxious  care  —  so  determined 
upon  survival  and  so  indifferent  to  morals 
—  that  had  induced  her  long  devotion  to 


'jG     LONG  ROAD  OF  WOMAN'S  MEMORY 

her  one  child  least  equipped  to  take  care 
of  himself;  and  for  the  same  reason  the 
helpless  little  creature  whose  existence  no 
one  else  was  deeply  concerned  to  preserve 
had  become  so  entwined  in  her  affections 
that  separation  was  impossible. 

From  time  to  time  a  mother  goes  further 
than  this,  in  her  determination  to  deal 
justly  with  the  unhappy  situation  in  which 
her  daughter  is  placed.  When  the  mother 
of  a  so-called  fallen  girl  is  of  that  type 
of  respectability  which  is  securely  founded 
upon  narrow  precepts,  inherited  through 
generations  of  careful  living,  it  requires 
genuine  courage  to  ignore  the  social  stigma 
in  order  to  consider  only  the  moral  de- 
velopment of  her  child,  although  the  re- 
sult of  such  courage  doubtless  minimizes 
the  chagrin  and  disgrace  for  the  girl  herself. 

In  one  such  instance  the  parents  of  the 
girl,  who  had  been  prevented  from  marry- 
ing her  lover  because  the  families  on  both 
sides  objected  to  differences  of  religion, 
have  openly  faced  the  situation  and  made 
the  baby  a  beloved  member  of  the  house- 
hold.    The  pretty  young  mother  arrogates 


DISTURBING    CONVENTIONS  77 

to  herself  a  hint  of  martyrdom  for  her 
faith's  sake,  but  the  discipline  and  re- 
sponsibility are  working  wonders  for  her 
character.  In  her  hope  of  earning  money 
enough  for  two,  she  has  been  stirred  to  new 
ambition  and  is  eagerly  attending  a  busi- 
ness college.  She  suffers  a  certain  amount 
of  social  ostracism  but  at  the  same  time  her 
steady  courage  excites  genuine  admiration. 
In  another  case  a  fearless  mother  exacts 
seven  dollars  a  week  in  payment  of  the 
board  for  her  daughter  and  the  baby,  al- 
though the  girl  earns  but  eight  dollars  a 
week  in  a  cigar  factory  and  buys  such 
clothing  for  two  as  she  can  with  the  re- 
maining dollar.  She  admits  that  it  is 
*'hard  sledding,"  but  that  the  baby  is 
"mighty  nice."  Whatever  her  state  of 
mind,  she  evidently  has  no  notion  of  re- 
belling against  her  mother's  authority,  and 
is  humbly  grateful  that  she  was  not  turned 
out  of  doors  when  the  situation  was  dis- 
covered. It  is  possible  that  the  mother's 
remorse  at  her  failure  to  guard  her  daugh- 
ter from  wrong  doing  enables  her  thus 
grimly    to    defy    social    standards    which, 


78      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

although  they  are  based  upon  stern  and 
narrow  tenets,  nevertheless  epitomize  the 
bitter  wisdom  of  generations.  Such 
mothers,  overcoming  that  timidity  which 
makes  it  so  difficult  to  effect  changes  in 
daily  living,  make  a  genuine  contribution 
to  the  solution  of  the  vexed  problem. 

In  spite  of  much  obtuseness  on  the  part 
of  those  bound  by  the  iron  fetters  of  con- 
vention, these  individual  cases  suggest  a 
practical  method  of  procedure.  For  quite 
as  pity  and  fierce  maternal  affection  for 
their  own  children  drove  mothers  all  over 
the  world  to  ostracize  and  cruelly  punish 
the  "bad  woman"  who  would  destroy  the 
home  by  taking  away  the  breadwinner  and 
the  father,  so  it  is  possible  that,  under  the 
changed  conditions  of  modern  life,  this 
same  pity  for  little  children,  this  same  con- 
cern that,  even  if  they  are  the  children 
of  the  outcast,  they  must  still  be  nourished 
and  properly  reared,  will  make  good  the 
former  wrongs.  There  has  certainly  been 
a  great  modification  of  the  harsh  judg- 
ments meted  out  in  such  cases,  as  women 
all  over  the  world  have  endeavored,  through 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  79 

the  old  bungling  method  of  trial  and 
error,  to  deal  justly  with  individual  situ- 
ations. Each  case  has  been  quietly  judged 
by  reference  to  an  altered  moral  standard, 
for  while  the  ethical  code  like  the  legal 
code  stands  in  need  of  constant  revision, 
the  remodeling  of  the  former  is  always  pri- 
vate, tacit  and  informal  in  marked  con- 
trast to  the  public  and  ceremonious  acts 
of  law-makers  and  judges  when  the  latter 
is  changed. 

Such  measure  of  success  as  the  organized 
Woman's  Movement  has  attained  in  the 
direction  of  a  larger  justice  has  come 
through  an  overwhelming  desire  to  cherish 
both  the  illegitimate  child  and  his  un- 
fortunate mother.  In  addition  to  that, 
the  widespread  effort  of  modern  women  to 
obtain  a  recognized  legal  status  for  them- 
selves and  their  own  children  has  also 
been  largely  dependent  upon  this  desire, 
at  least  in  the  beginnings  of  the  movement. 
Women  slowly  had  discovered  that  the 
severe  attitude  towards  the  harlot  had  not 
only  become  embodied  in  the  statutory 
law  concerning  her,  as  thousands  of  court 


8o     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

decisions  every  day  bear  testimony,  but  had 
become  registered  in  the  laws  and  social 
customs  pertaining  to  good  women  as 
well ;  the  Code  Napoleon,  which  prohibited 
that  search  be  made  for  the  father  of  an 
illegitimate  child,  also  denied  the  custody 
of  her  children  to  the  married  mother ; 
those  same  states  in  which  the  laws  con- 
sidered a  little  girl  of  ten  years  the  seducer 
of  a  man  of  well-known  immorality,  did 
not  allow  a  married  woman  to  hold  her 
own  property  nor  to  retain  her  own  wages. 
The  enthusiasm  responsible  for  the  world- 
wide Woman's  Movement  was  generated 
in  the  revolt  against  such  gross  injustices. 
The  most  satisfactory  achievements  of  the 
movement  have  been  secured  in  the  Scan- 
dinavian countries,  where  the  splendid  code 
of  laws  protecting  all  women  and  children 
was  founded  on  the  instinct  to  defend  the 
weakest,  and  upon  a  determination  to 
lighten  that  social  opprobrium  which  makes 
it  so  unreasonably  difficult  for  a  mother  to 
support  a  child  born  out  of  wedlock.  In 
Germany,  when  the  presence  of  over  a 
million  illegitimate  children  under  the  age 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  8l 

of  fourteen  years  made  the  situation  acute, 
the  best  women  of  the  nation,  asserting 
that  all  attempts  to  deal  out  social  pun- 
ishment upon  the  mothers  resulted  only  in 
a  multitude  of  ill-nourished  and  weakened 
children,  founded  *'The  Mutterchutz" 
Movement.  Through  its  efforts  to  secure 
justice  and  protection  for  these  mothers, 
it  has  come  to  be  the  great  defender  of 
the  legal  rights  of  all  German  women. 

Many  achievements  of  the  modern  move- 
ment demonstrate  that  woman  deals  most 
efficiently  with  fresh  experiences  when  she 
coalesces  them  into  the  impressions  Memory 
has  kept  in  store  for  her.  Eagerly  seeking 
continuity  with  the  past  by  her  own  secret 
tests  of  affinity,  she  reinforces  and  encour- 
ages Memory's  instinctive  processes  of 
selection.  If  she  develops  her  craving  for 
continuity  into  a  willingness  to  subordinate 
a  part  to  the  whole  and  into  a  sustained 
and  self-forgetful  search  for  congruity  and 
harmony  with  a  life  which  is  greater  than 
hers,  she  may  lift  the  entire  selective  pro- 
cess into  the  realm  of  Art ;  at  least  so  far 
as  Art  is  dependent  upon  proportion  and 


82     LONG   ROAD  OF   WOMAN'S   MEMORY 

so  far  as  beauty  hangs  upon  an  ineffable 
balance  between  restraint  and  inclusion. 
Hungry  for  this  finely  proportioned  living, 
she  may  at  length  become  a  disciple  of 
Diotema,  the  wisest  woman  of  antiquity, 
who  asserted  that  the  life  which  above  all 
we  should  live,  must  be  discovered  by 
faithful  and  strenuous  search  for  ever- 
widening  kinds  of  beauty. 

In  woman's  search  for  "the  eternal 
moment,"  balanced  independently  of  time 
itself  because  so  melted  both  into  memories 
of  the  past  and  into  surmises  of  new  beauty 
for  the  future  of  her  children's  children,  she 
may  recognize  as  one  of  the  universal  har- 
monies the  touching  devotion  of  the  endless 
multitude  of  mothers  who  were  the  humble 
vessels  for  life's  continuance  and  who  carried 
the  burden  in  safety  to  the  next  generation. 

Maternal  affection  and  solicitude,  in 
woman's  remembering  heart,  may  at  length 
coalesce  into  a  chivalric  protection  for  all 
that  is  young  and  unguarded.  This  chiv- 
alry of  women  expressing  protection  for 
those  at  the  bottom  of  society,  so  far  as  it 
has  already  developed,  suggests  a  return  to 


DISTURBING   CONVENTIONS  83 

that  idealized  version  of  chivalry  which 
was  the  consecration  of  strength  to  the 
defence  of  weakness,  unlike  the  actual  chiv- 
alry of  the  armed  knight  who  served  his 
lady  with  gentle  courtesy  while  his  fields 
were  ploughed  by  peasant  women  mis- 
shapen through  toil  and  hunger. 

As  an  example  of  this  new  chivalry,  the 
Hungarian  women  have  recently  risen  in 
protest  against  a  proposed  military  regu- 
lation requiring  that  all  young  women  in 
domestic  service,  who  are  living  in  the 
vicinity  of  barracks,  be  examined  each  week 
by  medical  officers  in  order  to  protect  the 
soldiers  from  disease.  The  good  women  in 
Hungary  spiritedly  resented  the  assumption 
that  these  girls,  simply  because  they  are  the 
least  protected  of  any  class  in  the  commu- 
nity, should  be  subjected  to  this  insult. 

An  instance  of  this  sort  once  again  il- 
lustrates that  moral  passion  is  the  only 
solvent  for  prejudice,  and  that  women  have 
come  to  feel  reproached  and  disturbed 
when  they  ignore  the  dynamic  urgency  of 
memories  as  fundamental  as  those  upon 
which  prohibitive  conventions  are  based. 


CHAPTER  IV 

women's    memories  —  INTEGRATING    IN- 
DUSTRY 

If  it  has  always  been  the  mission  of  lit- 
erature to  translate  the  particular  act  into 
something  of  the  universal,  to  reduce  the 
element  of  crude  pain  in  the  isolated  ex- 
perience by  bringing  to  the  sufferer  a  real- 
ization that  his  is  but  the  common  lot, 
this  mission  may  have  been  performed 
through  such  stories  as  that  of  the  Devil 
Baby  for  simple,  hardworking  women  who 
at  any  given  moment  compose  the  bulk  of 
the  women  in  the  world. 

Certainly  some  of  the  visitors  to  the 
Devil  Baby  attempted  to  generalize  and 
evidently  found  a  certain  enlargement  of 
the  horizon,  an  interpretation  of  life  as  it 
were,  in  the  effort.  They  exhibited  that 
confidence  which  sometimes  comes  to  the 
more  literate  person  when,  finding  himself 

84 


INTEGRATING    INDUSTRY  85 

morally  isolated  among  those  hostile  to 
his  immediate  aims,  his  reading  assures 
him  that  other  people  in  the  world  have 
thought  as  he  does.  Later  when  he  dares 
to  act  on  the  conviction  his  own  experi- 
ence has  forced  upon  him,  he  has  become 
so  conscious  of  a  cloud  of  witnesses  torn 
out  of  literature  and  warmed  into  living 
comradeship,  that  he  scarcely  distinguishes 
them  from  the  likeminded  people  actually 
in  the  world  whom  he  has  later  discovered 
as  a  consequence  of  his  deed. 

In  some  of  the  reminiscences  related  by 
working  women  I  was  surprised,  not  so 
much  by  the  fact  that  memory  could  in- 
tegrate the  individual  experience  into  a 
sense  of  relation  with  the  more  impersonal 
aspects  of  life,  as  that  the  larger  meaning 
had  been  obtained  when  the  fructifying 
memory  had  had  nothing  to  feed  upon  but 
the  harshest  and  most  monotonous  of  in- 
dustrial experiences. 

I  held  a  conversation  with  one  such 
woman  when  she  came  to  confess  that  her 
long  struggle  was  over  and  that  she  and 
her  sister  had  at  last  turned  their  faces  to 


86      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

the  poorhouse.  She  clearly  revealed  not 
only  that  she  had  caught  a  glimpse  of  the 
great  social  forces  of  her  day,  but  that  she 
had  had  the  ability  to  modify  her  daily 
living  by  what  she  had  perceived. 

Perhaps,  under  the  shadow  of  a  tragic 
surrender,  she  had  obtained  a  new  sense  of 
values,  or  at  least  had  made  up  her  mind 
that  it  was  not  worth  while  any  longer  to 
conceal  her  genuine  experiences,  for  she 
talked  more  fully  of  her  hard  life  than  I 
had  ever  heard  her  before  in  the  many 
years  I  had  known  her.  She  related  in 
illuminating  detail  an  incident  in  her  long 
effort  of  earning,  by  ill-paid  and  unskilled 
labor,  the  money  with  which  to  support 
her  decrepit  mother  and  her  imbecile  sister. 
For  more  than  fifty  years  she  had  never 
for  a  moment  considered  the  possibility  of 
sending  either  of  them  to  a  public  institu- 
tion, although  it  had  become  almost  impos- 
sible to  maintain  such  a  household  after  the 
mother,  who  lived  to  be  ninety-four  years 
old,  had  become  utterly  distraught. 

She  was  still  sharing  her  scanty  livelihood 
with  the  feeble-minded  sister,  although  she 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  87 

herself  was  unable  to  do  anything  but  wash 
vegetables  and  peel  potatoes  in  a  small 
restaurant  of  her  neighborhood.  The  cold 
water  necessary  to  these  processes  made  her 
hands,  already  crippled  with  rheumatism, 
so  bad  that  on  some  days  she  could  not 
hold  anything  smaller  than  a  turnip,  al- 
though the  other  people  in  the  kitchen 
surreptitiously  helped  her  all  they  could 
and  the  cooks  gave  her  broken  food  to  carry 
home  to  the  ever  hungry  sister. 

She  told  of  her  monotonous  years  in  a 
box  factory,  where  she  had  always  worked 
with  the  settled  enmity  of  the  other  em- 
ployes. They  regarded  her  as  a  pace 
setter,  and  she,  obliged  to  work  fast  and 
furiously  in  order  to  keep  three  people, 
and  full  of  concern  for  her  old  mother's 
many  unfulfilled  needs,  had  never  under- 
stood what  the  girls  meant  when  they 
talked  about  standing  by  each  other. 

She  did  not  change  in  her  attitude  even 
when  she  found  the  prices  of  piece  work 
went  down  lower  and  lower,  so  that  at 
last  she  was  obliged  to  work  overtime  late 
into  the  night  in  order  to  earn  the  small 


88      LONG    ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

amount  she  had  previously  earned  by  day. 
She  was  seventy  years  old  when  the  legality 
of  the  Illinois  Ten  Hour  Law  was  con- 
tested, and  her  employer  wanted  her  to 
testify  in  court  that  she  was  opposed  to 
the  law  because  she  could  not  have  sup- 
ported her  old  mother  all  those  years  un- 
less she  had  been  allowed  to  work  nights. 
She  found  herself  at  last  dimly  conscious 
of  what  it  was  that  her  long  time  enemies, 
the  union  girls,  had  been  trying  to  do, 
and  a  subconscious  loyalty  to  her  own 
kind  made  it  impossible  for  her  to  bear 
testimony  against  them.  She  did  not 
analyze  her  motives  but  told  me  that, 
fearing  she  might  yield  to  her  employer's 
request,  in  sheer  panic  she  had  abruptly 
left  his  factory  and  moved  her  helpless 
household  to  another  part  of  the  city  on 
the  very  day  she  was  expected  to  appear  in 
court.  In  her  haste  she  left  four  days  un- 
paid wages  behind  her,  and  moving  the 
family  took  all  the  money  she  had  pains- 
takingly saved  for  the  coming  winter's 
coal.  She  had  unknowingly  moved  into  a 
neighborhood    of   cheap    restaurants,    and 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  89 

from  that  time  on  she  worked  in  any  of 
them  which  would  employ  her  until  now 
at  last  she  was  too  feeble  to  be  of  much 
use  to  anybody. 

Although  she  had  never  joined  the  Union 
which  finally  became  so  flourishing  in  the 
box  factory  she  had  left,  she  was  conscious 
that  in  a  moment  of  great  temptation  she 
had  refrained  from  seeking  her  own  ad- 
vantage at  the  expense  of  others.  As  she 
bunglingly  tried  to  express  her  motives, 
she  said:  "The  Irish  —  you  know  I  was 
ten  years  old  when  we  came  over  —  often 
feel  like  that ;  it  isn't  exactly  that  you  are 
sorry  after  you  have  done  a  thing,  nor  so 
much  that  you  don't  do  it  because  you  know 
you  will  be  sorry  afterwards,  nor  that  any- 
thing in  particular  will  happen  to  you  if 
you  do  it,  but  that  you  haven't  the  heart 
for  it,  that  it  goes  against  your  nature." 

When  I  expressed  my  admiration  for  her 
prompt  action  she  replied :  "  I  have  never 
told  this  before  except  to  one  person,  to  a 
woman  who  was  organizing  for  the  gar- 
ment workers  and  who  came  to  my  house 
one  night  about  nine  o'clock,  just  as  I  was 


90     LONG   ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

having  my  supper.  I  had  it  late  in  those 
days  because  I  used  to  scrub  the  restaurant 
floor  after  everybody  left.  My  sister  was 
asleep  back  of  the  stove,  I  looked  sharp 
not  to  wake  her  up  and  I  don't  believe  the 
Union  woman  ever  knew  that  she  wasn't 
just  like  other  people.  The  organizer  was 
looking  for  some  of  the  women  living  in 
our  block  who  had  been  taking  work 
from  the  shops  ever  since  the  strike  was  on. 
She  was  clean  tired  out,  and  when  I  offered 
her  a  cup  of  tea  she  said  as  quick  as  a 
flash,  *You  are  not  a  scab,  are  you.?'  I 
just  held  up  my  poor  old  hands  before  her 
face,  swollen  red  from  scrubbing  and  full 
of  chilblains,  and  I  told  her  that  I  couldn't 
sew  a  stitch  if  my  life  depended  on  it. 

"When  I  offered  her  the  second  cup  of 
tea  —  a  real  educated-looking  woman  she 
was,  and  she  must  have  been  used  to  better 
tea  than  mine  boiled  out  of  the  old  tea 
leaves  the  restaurant  cook  always  let  me 
bring  home  —  I  said  to  her,  'My  hands 
aren't  the  only  reason  I'm  not  scabbing. 
I  see  too  much  of  the  miserable  wages 
these   women    around    here   get    for    their 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  91 

sweatshop  work,  and  I've  done  enough 
harm  already  with  my  pace  setting,  and 
my  head  so  full  of  my  poor  old  mother  that 
I  never  thought  of  anybody  else.'  She 
smiled  at  me  and  nodded  her  head  over 
my  old  cracked  cup.  'You  are  a  Union 
woman  all  right,'  she  said.  'You  have  the 
true  spirit  whether  you  carry  a  card  or 
not.  I  am  mighty  glad  to  have  met  you 
after  all  the  scabs  I  have  talked  to  this 
day.'" 

The  old  woman  repeated  the  words  as  one 
who  solemnly  recalls  the  great  phrase  which 
raised  him  into  a  knightly  order,  revealing 
a  secret  pride  in  her  unavowed  fellowship 
with  Trades  Unions,  for  she  had  vaguely 
known  at  the  time  of  the  Ten  Hour  trial 
that  powerful  federations  of  them  had 
paid  for  the  lawyers  and  had  gathered  the 
witnesses.  Some  dim  memory  of  Irish 
ancestors,  always  found  on  the  side  of  the 
weak  in  the  unending  struggle  with  the 
oppressions  of  the  strong,  may  have  de- 
termined her  action.  She  may  have  been 
dominated  by  a  subconscious  suggestion 
"from  the  dust  that  sleeps,"  a  suggestion 


92      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

so  simple,  so  insistent  and  monotonous 
that  it  had  victoriously  survived  its  original 
sphere  of  conduct. 

It  was  in  keeping  with  the  drab  colored 
experiences  of  her  seventy  hard  years  that 
her  contribution  to  the  long  struggle  should 
have  been  one  of  inglorious  flight,  never- 
theless she  had  gallantly  recognized  the 
Trades  Union  organizer  as  a  comrade  in  a 
common  cause.  She  cherished  in  her  heart 
the  memory  of  one  golden  moment  when 
she  had  faintly  heard  the  trumpets  summon 
her  and  had  made  her  utmost  response. 

When  the  simple  story  of  a  lifetime  of 
sacrifice  to  family  obligations  and  of  one 
supreme  effort  to  respond  to  a  social  claim 
came  to  an  end,  I  reflected  that  for  more 
than  half  a  century  the  narrator  had  freely 
given  all  her  time,  all  her  earnings,  all  her 
affections,  and  yet  during  the  long  period 
had  developed  no  habit  of  self-pity.  At 
a  crucial  moment  she  had  been  able  to 
estimate  life,  not  in  terms  of  her  self- 
immolation  but  in  relation  to  a  hard  pressed 
multitude  of  fellow  workers. 

As  she  sat  there,  a  tall,  gaunt  woman 


INTEGRATING    INDUSTRY  93 

broken  through  her  devotion,  she  inevitably 
suggested  the  industrial  wrongs  and  op- 
pressions suffered  by  the  women  who,  for- 
gotten and  neglected,  perform  so  much  of 
the  unlovely  drudgery  upon  which  our  in- 
dustrial order  depends.  At  the  moment 
I  could  recall  only  one  of  her  starved  am- 
bitions which  to  my  knowledge  had  ever 
been  attained.  When  a  friend  tenderly 
placed  a  pair  of  white  satin  slippers  upon 
the  coffined  feet  of  her  old  mother  who 
for  more  than  ninety  years  had  travelled 
a  long  hard  road  and  had  stumbled  against 
many  stones,  the  loving  heart  of  the  aged 
daughter  overflowed.  "It  is  herself  would 
know  how  I  prayed  for  white  satin  shoes 
for  the  burial,  thinking  as  how  they  might 
make  it  up  to  mother,  she  who  never 
knew  where  the  next  pair  was  coming  from 
and  often  had  to  borrow  to  go  to  Mass." 
I  remembered  that  as  my  friend  and  I 
left  the  spotless  bare  room  wrapped  in  the 
mystery  of  death  and  walked  back  to  Hull- 
House  together,  we  passed  a  little  child 
who  proudly  challenged  our  attention  to 
his  new  shoes,  *' shiny"  in  the  first  moment 


94     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

of  joyous  possession.  We  could  but  recog- 
nize the  epitome  of  the  hard  struggle  of 
the  very  poor,  from  the  moment  they 
scramble  out  of  their  rude  cradles  until 
they  are  lowered  into  their  "partial  pay- 
ment" graves,  to  keep  shoes  upon  their 
feet.  The  rare  moments  of  touching  pleas- 
ure when  the  simple  desire  for  "a  new 
pair"  is  fulfilled  are  doubtless  indicated 
in  the  early  fairy  tales  by  the  rewards  of 
glistening  red  shoes  or  glass  slippers  to 
the  good  child ;  in  the  religious  allegories 
which  turn  life  itself  into  one  long  pil- 
grimage, by  the  promises  to  the  faithful 
that  they  shall  be  shod  with  the  sandals 
of  righteousness  and  to  the  blessed  ones, 
who  having  formally  renounced  the  world, 
forswearing  shoes  altogether  and  hum- 
bly walking  on  without  them,  that  their 
bruised  and  torn  feet  shall  yet  gleam  lily- 
white  on  the  streets  of  Paradise. 

I  suddenly  saw  in  this  worn  old  woman 
who  sat  before  me,  what  George  Sand 
described  as  "a  rare  and  austere  produc- 
tion of  human  suffering"  and  was  so  filled 
with    a    fresh    consciousness    of   the    long 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  95 

barren  road  travelled  by  the  patient 
mother  and  daughter,  that  it  merged  into 
the  Via  Dolorosa  of  the  Poor  of  the  world. 
It  may  have  been  through  this  suggestion 
of  an  actual  street  that  my  memory  vividly 
evoked  a  group  of  Russian  pilgrims  I  had 
once  seen  in  Holy  Week  as  they  trium- 
phantly approached  Jerusalem.  Their 
heads,  garlanded  in  wild  flowers  still  fresh 
with  early  dew,  were  lifted  in  joyous  sing- 
ing but  their  broken  and  bleeding  feet, 
bound  in  white  cloth  and  thrust  into  san- 
dals of  stripped  bark,  were  the  actual  sac- 
rifice they  were  devoutly  offering  at  tne 
Sepulchre. 

I  As  my  mind  swiftly  came  back  from 
the  blossoming  fields  of  Palestine  to  the 
crowded  Industrial  district  of  Chicago,  I 
found  myself  recalling  a  pensive  remark 
made  by  the  gifted  Rachel  Varnhagen,  a 
century  ago.  "Careless  Fate  never  re- 
quires of  us  what  we  are  really  capable  of 
doing." 

This  overwhelming  sense  of  the  waste  in 
woman's  unused  capacity  came  to  me 
again  during  a  Garment  Workers'  strike, 


96      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

when  some  of  the  young  women  involved 
were  sitting  in  the  very  chairs  occupied 
so  recently  by  the  visitors  to  the  Devil 
Baby.  They  brought  a  curious  reminder 
of  the  overworked  and  heavily  burdened 
mothers  who  had  yet  been  able  to  keep 
the  taste  of  life  in  their  mouths  and  who 
could  not  be  overborne,  because  their  en- 
durance was  rooted  in  simple  and  instinc- 
tive human  affections.  During  the  long 
strike  these  young  women  endured  all 
sorts  of  privations  without  flinching  ;  some 
o^  them  actual  hunger,  most  of  them  dis- 
approbation from  their  families,  and  all  of 
them  a  loss  of  that  money  which  alone  could 
procure  for  them  the  American  standards 
so  highly  prized.  Through  participation 
in  the  strike  they  all  took  the  risk  of  losing 
their  positions,  and  yet,  facing  a  future  of 
unemployment  and  wretchedness,  they  dis- 
played a  stubborn  endurance  which  held 
out  week  after  week. 

Perhaps  because  of  my  recent  conver- 
sations with  old  women  I  received  the 
impression  that  the  very  power  of  resist- 
ance in  such  a  socialized  undertaking  as  a 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  97 

strike,  presents  a  marked  contrast  in  both 
its  origin  and  motives  to  the  traditional 
type  of  endurance  exercised  by  the  mothers 
and  grandmothers  of  the  strikers  or  by 
their  acquaintances  among  domestic  women 
Hving  in  the  same  crowded  tenements. 

When  a  mother  cares  for  a  sick  child 
for  days  and  nights  without  relief,  the  long 
period  of  solicitude  and  dread  exhausting 
every  particle  of  her  vitality,  her  strength 
is  constantly  renewed  from  the  vast  reser- 
voirs of  maternal  love  and  pity  whenever 
she  touches  the  soft  flesh  or  hears  the 
plaintive  little  voice.  But  such  girls  as 
the  strikers  represent  are  steadily  bending 
their  energies  to  loveless  and  mechanical 
labor,  and  are  obliged  to  go  on  without  this 
direct  and  personal  renewal  of  their  powers 
of  resistance.  They  must  be  sustained  as 
soldiers  on  a  forced  march  are  sustained, 
by  their  sense  of  comradeship  in  high  en- 
deavor. Naturally,  some  of  the  young 
working  women  are  never  able  to  achieve 
this  and  can  keep  on  with  the  monotony 
of  factory  work  only  when  they  persuade 
themselves    that    they   are    getting    ready. 


98      LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

and  have  not  yet  begun  their  own  Hves, 
because  real  hving  for  them  must  include 
a  home  of  their  own  and  children  to 
"do  for." 

Such  unutilized  dynamic  power  illus- 
trates the  stupid  waste  of  those  impulses  and 
affections,  registered  in  the  very  bodily  struc- 
ture itself,  which  are  ruthlessly  pushed  aside 
and  considered  of  no  moment  to  the  work 
in  which  so  many  women  are  now  engaged. 
My  conversations  with  these  girls  of 
modern  industry  continually  filled  me  with 
surprise  that,  required  as  they  are  to  work 
under  conditions  unlike  those  which  women 
have  ever  before  encountered,  they  have 
not  only  made  a  remarkable  adaptation 
but  have  so  ably  equipped  themselves  with 
a  new  set  of  motives.  The  girl  who  stands 
on  one  spot  for  fifty-six  hours  each  week  as 
she  feeds  a  machine,  endlessly  repeating 
the  identical  motions  of  her  arms  and 
wrists,  is  much  further  from  the  type  of 
woman's  traditional  activity  than  her 
mother  who  cooks,  cleans,  and  washes  for 
the  household.  The  young  woman  who 
spends  her  time  in  packing  biscuits  into 


INTEGRATING    INDUSTRY  99 

boxes  which  come  to  her  down  a  chute 
and  are  whirled  away  from  her  on  a  minia- 
ture trolley,  has  never  even  seen  how  the 
biscuits  are  made,  for  the  factory  proper 
is  separated  from  the  packing  room  by  a 
door  with  the  sign  "No  Admittance." 
She  must  work  all  day  without  the  vital 
and  direct  interest  in  the  hourly  results 
of  her  labors  which  her  mother  had. 

These  girls  present  a  striking  antithesis 
to  the  visitors  to  the  Devil  Baby  who  in 
their  forlorn  and  cheerless  efforts  were 
merely  continuing  the  traditional  struggle 
against  brutality,  indifference,  and  neglect 
that  helpless  old  people  and  little  children 
might  not  be  trampled  in  the  dust.  For 
these  simple  women  it  is  the  conditions 
under  which  the  struggle  is  waged  which 
have  changed,  rather  than  the  nature  o^ 
the  contest.  Even  in  this  unlovely  strug- 
gle, the  older  women  utilize  well-seasoned 
faculties,  in  contrast  to  the  newly  devel- 
oped powers  required  by  the  multitude  of 
young  girls  who  for  the  first  time  in  the 
long  history  of  woman's  labor,  are  uniting 
their  efforts  in  order   to  obtain   opportu- 


100     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

nities  for  a  fuller  and  more  normal  living. 
Organizing  with  men  and  women  of  divers 
nationalities  they  are  obliged  to  form  new 
ties  absolutely  unlike  family  bonds.  On 
the  other  hand,  these  girls  possess  the  enor- 
mous advantage  over  women  of  the  do- 
mestic type  of  having  experienced  the  dis- 
cipline arising  from  impersonal  obligations 
and  of  having  tasted  the  freedom  from 
economic  dependence,  so  valuable  that 
too  heavy  a  price  can  scarcely  be  paid 
for  it. 

This  clash  between  the  traditional  con- 
ception of  woman's  duty  narrowed  solely 
to  family  obligations  and  the  claims  arising 
from  the  complexity  of  the  industrial  situ- 
ation, manifests  scarcely  a  suggestion  of 
the  latent  war  so  vaguely  apprehended 
from  the  earliest  times  as  a  possibility  be- 
tween men  and  women.  Even  the  re- 
strained Greeks  believed  that  when  the 
obscure  women  at  the  bottom  of  society 
could  endure  no  longer  and  "the  oppressed 
women  struck  back,  it  would  not  be  justice 
which  came  but  the  revenge  of  madness." 
My  own  observation  has  discovered  little 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  lOi 

suggesting  this  mood,  certainly  not  among 
the  women  active  in  the  Labor  Movement. 

I  recall  the  recent  experience  of  an  or- 
ganizer whom  I  very  much  admire  for  her 
valiant  services  in  the  garment  trades  and 
whom  I  have  known  from  her  earliest 
girlhood.  Her  character  confirms  the  .con- 
tention that  our  chief  concern  with  the 
past  is  not  what  we  have  done,  nor  the  ad- 
ventures we  have  met,  but  the  moral  re- 
action of  bygone  events  within  ourselves. 

As  an  orphaned  child  she  had  been  cared 
for  by  two  aunts  who  owned  between 
them  a  little  shop  which  pretended  to 
be  a  tailoring  establishment,  but  which 
in  reality  was  a  distributing  centre  for 
home  work  among  the  Italian  women  and 
newly  immigrated  Russian  Jews  living  in 
the  neighborhood.  Her  aunts,  because 
they  were  Americans,  superior  in  education 
and  resources  to  the  humble  home  workers, 
by  dint  of  much  bargaining  both  with  the 
wholesale  houses  from  which  they  pro- 
cured the  garments,  and  with  the  foreign 
women  to  whom  they  distributed  them, 
had  been  able  to  secure  a  very  good  com- 


I02     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

mission.  For  many  years  they  had  made 
a  comfortable  hving,  and  in  addition  had 
acquired  an  exalted  social  position  in  the 
neighborhood,  for  they  were  much  looked 
up  to  by  those  so  dependent  upon  them 
for  work. 

Although  my  friend  was  expected  to 
help  in  the  shop  as  much  as  possible, 
she  was  sent  regularly  to  school  and  had 
already  "graduated  from  the  eighth  grade," 
when  a  law  was  passed  in  the  Illinois 
legislature,  popularly  known  as  the  Anti 
Sweat-shop  Law,  which,  within  a  year, 
had  ruined  her  aunts'  business.  After 
they  had  been  fined  in  court  for  violating 
the  law,  a  case  which  obtained  much  pub- 
licity because  smallpox  was  discovered  in 
two  of  the  tenement  houses  in  which  the 
home  finishers  were  living,  the  aunts  were 
convinced  that  they  could  not  continue  to 
give  out  work  to  the  Italian  and  Rus- 
sian Jewish  women.  Reluctantly  foregoing 
their  commissions  they  then  tried  crowd- 
ing their  own  house  and  shop  with  workers, 
only  to  be  again  taken  into  court  and 
fined  when  the  inspector  discovered  their 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  103 

kitchen  and  bedrooms  full  of  half-finished 
garments.  They  both  flatly  refused  to  go 
into  a  factory  to  work,  and  after  a  futile 
attempt  to  revive  the  tailoring  business, 
never  very  genuine,  they  were  finally  re- 
duced to  the  dimensions  of  the  tiny  shop  it- 
self, which,  under  the  new  regulations  as  to 
light  and  air  could  accommodate  but  three 
people.  My  friend  was  at  once  taken  from 
school  and  made  one  of  these  ill-paid  work- 
ers and  the  little  household  was  held  to- 
gether on  the  pittance  the  three  could 
earn. 

It  was  but  natural,  perhaps,  that  as  these 
displaced  proprietors  became  poorer  they 
should  ever  grow  more  bitter  against  the 
reformers  and  the  Trades  Unionists  who, 
between  them,  had  secured  the  *' high- 
brow" legislation  which  had  destroyed 
their  honest  business. 

The  niece  was  married  at  eighteen  to  a 
clerk  in  a  neighboring  department  store 
who  worked  four  evenings  a  week  and  every 
other  Sunday  in  his  determination  to  get 
on.  The  bride  moved  into  a  more  pros- 
perous neighborhood   and   I   saw  little  of 


104     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

her  husband  or  herself  for  ten  years,  during 
which  time  they  made  four  payments  on 
the  Httle  house  they  occupied  fully  three 
miles  from  the  now  abandoned  sweat-shop. 
Her  husband  worked  hard  with  a  consuming 
desire  to  rear  his  children  in  good  sur- 
roundings as  much  as  possible  unlike  the 
slums,  as  he  somewhat  brutally  designated 
the  neighborhood  of  his  own  youth. 
Through  his  unrelieved  years  in  the  cheap 
department  store  where,  however,  he  had 
always  felt  a  great  satisfaction  in  being  well 
dressed  and  had  resisted  any  attempts  of 
his  fellow  clerks  to  shorten  their  prepos- 
terous hours  by  trades-union  organization, 
his  health  was  gradually  undermined  and 
he  finally  developed  tuberculosis.  He  was 
unable  to  support  his  family  during  the 
last  decade  of  his  life,  and  in  her  desperate 
need  my  friend  went  back  to  the  only 
trade  she  had,  that  of  finishing  garments. 
During  these  years,  although  she  sold  the 
little  house  and  placed  her  boy  in  a  semi- 
philanthropic  institution,  she  steadily  faced 
the  problem  of  earning  insufficient  wages 
for  the  support  of  the  family,  the  pang  of 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  105 

her  failure  constantly  augmented  by  the 
knowledge  that,  in  spite  of  her  utmost 
efforts,  the  invalid  never  received  the  food 
and  care  his  condition  required.  The  cloth- 
ing factory  in  which  she  then  worked 
illustrated  the  lowest  ebb  in  the  fortune  of 
the  garment  workers  in  American  cities 
when,  the  sweat  shop  having  been  largely 
eliminated  through  the  efforts  of  the  fac- 
tory inspectors,  the  workers  from  every 
land  were  crowded  into  the  hastily  organ- 
ized factories.  Separated  by  their  diverse 
languages  and  through  their  long  habits  of 
home  work,  they  had  become  too  secretive 
even  to  tell  one  another  the  amount  of  wages 
each  was  receiving.  It  was  as  if  the  com- 
petition had  been  transferred  from  the 
sweat  shop  contractors  to  the  individual 
workers  themselves,  sitting  side  by  side  in 
the  same  room,  and  perhaps  it  was  not 
surprising  that  the  workers  felt  as  if  they 
had  been  hunted  down  into  their  very 
kitchens  and  their  poverty  cruelly  exposed 
to  public  view. 

My  friend  shared  this  wretchedness  and 
carried  into  it  the  bitterness  of  her  early 


lo6     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

experience.  She  says  now  that  she  never 
caught  even  a  suggestion  that  this  might 
be  but  a  transitional  period  to  a  more 
ordered  sort  of  industrial  life. 

She  did  not  tell  me  just  when  and  how 
she  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that  wages 
must  be  higher,  that  legal  enactment  for 
better  conditions  must  be  supplemented 
by  the  efforts  of  the  workers  themselves, 
but  it  was  absolutely  clear  that  she  had 
independently  reached  that  conclusion  long 
before  a  strike  in  the  clothing  industry 
brought  her  into  contact  with  the  organized 
Labor  Movement.  It  was  certainly  not 
until  the  year  of  her  husband's  death  that 
she  became  aware  of  the  industrial  changes 
which  had  been  taking  place  during  the 
twenty-two  years  since  her  aunts'  business 
had  been  ruined. 

She  was  grateful  that  the  knowledge  had 
first  come  to  her  through  an  Italian  girl 
working  by  her  side,  for,  as  she  explained, 
her  old  attitude  toward  the  "dagoes,"  as 
a  people  to  be  exploited,  had  to  be  thor- 
oughly changed  before  she  could  be  of  much 
real  use  in  organizing  a  trade  in  which  so 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  107 

many  Italians  were  engaged.  Even  dur- 
ing the  strike  itself,  to  which  she  was 
thoroughly  committed,  having  been  con- 
vinced both  of  its  inevitability  and  of  the 
justice  of  its  demands,  she  resented  the 
fact  that  the  leadership  was  in  the  hands  of 
Russian  Jews  and,  secure  in  her  American- 
ism, she  felt  curiously  aloof  from  the  group 
with  which  she  was  so  intimately  identified. 

A  few  months  after  the  strike  my  friend 
fortunately  secured  a  place  in  a  manufac- 
tory of  men's  clothing,  in  which  there  had 
been  instituted  a  Trade  Board  for  the  ad- 
justment of  grievances,  and  where  wages 
and  hours  were  determined  by  joint  agree- 
ment. When  she  was  elected  to  the  posi- 
tion of  shop  representative  she  found 
herself  in  the  midst  of  one  of  the  most  in- 
teresting experiments  being  carried  on  in  the 
United  States,  not  only  from  the  standpoint 
of  labor  but  from  that  of  applying  the  prin- 
ciples of  representative  government  in  a  new 
field.  She  felt  the  stimulus  of  being  a  part 
in  that  most  absorbing  of  all  occupations  — 
the  reconstruction  of  a  living  world. 

One  evening,  at  Hull-House,  as  she  came 


I08     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

out  of  a  citizenship  class  she  had  been 
attending,  she  tried  to  express  some  of  the 
implications  of  the  great  undertaking  in 
which  more  than  ten  thousand  clothing 
employes  are  engaged.  She  repeated  the 
statement  made  by  the  leader  of  the  class 
that  it  was  the  solemn  duty  and  obligation 
of  the  United  States  not  only  to  keep  a* 
republican  form  of  government  alive  upon 
the  face  of  the  earth  and  to  fulfill  the  expec- 
tations of  the  founders  but  to  modify  and 
develope  that  type  of  government  as  con- 
ditions changed ;  he  had  said  that  the 
spirit  of  the  New  England  town  meeting 
might  be  manifested  through  a  referendum 
vote  in  a  large  city,  and  that  it  must  find 
some  such  vehicle  of  expression  if  it  would 
survive  under  changed  conditions.  Her 
eyes  were  quite  shining  as  she  made  her 
application  to  the  experiment  being  car- 
ried on  in  the  great  clothing  factory,  with 
its  many  shops  and  departments  unified 
in  mutual  effort.  Evidently  her  attention 
had  been  caught  by  the  similarity  between 
the  town  meeting  in  its  relation  to  a  more 
elaborated   form   of  government   and   the 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  109 

small  isolated  sweat-shop  such  as  that 
formerly  managed  by  her  aunts,  in  its  re- 
lation to  the  "biggest  clothing  factory  in 
the  world."  She  had  heard  her  fellow 
workers  say  that  the  "greenhorn"  often 
found  much  friendliness  in  a  small  shop 
where  his  own  language  was  spoken,  and 
where  he  could  earn  at  least  a  humble 
living  until  he  grew  accustomed  to  the 
habits  of  a  new  country,  whereas  he  would 
have  been  lost  and  terrified  in  a  factory. 
She  felt  very  strongly  the  necessity  of  trans- 
lating this  sense  of  comradeship  and  friendli- 
ness into  larger  terms,  and  she  believed  that 
it  could  be  done  by  the  united  workers. 

As  she  sat  by  my  desk,  this  woman  who 
had  not  yet  attained  her  fortieth  year 
looked  much  older,  as  if  illustrating  the 
saying  that  hard  labor  so  early  robs  the 
poor  man  of  his  youth  that  it  makes  his 
old  age  too  long.  She  seemed  to  me  for  the 
moment  to  have  gathered  up  in  her  own 
experience  the  transition  from  old  con- 
ditions to  new  and  to  be  standing  on  the 
threshold  of  a  great  development  in  the 
lives  of  working  women. 


no  LONG  ROAD  OF  WOMAN'S  MEMORY 

As  if  she  were  conscious  that  I  was  re- 
calHng  her  past  with  which  I  had  been  so 
familiar,  she  began  to  speak  again.  ''You 
know  that  I  have  both  of  my  children  with 
me  now ;  the  girl  graduates  from  the 
Normal  School  in  June  and  hopes  to  put 
herself  through  the  University  after  she  has 
taught  for  a  few  years.  She  reminds  me 
of  her  father  in  her  anxiety  to  know  people 
of  education,  to  get  on  in  the  world, 
and  I  am  sure  she  will  succeed.  The  boy 
has  caught  the  other  motive  of  pulling  up 
with  his  own  trade  and  of  standing  by  the 
organized  Labor  Movement.  Of  course, 
sewing  was  too  dull  for  him,  and  besides 
he  grew  ambitious  to  be  a  machinist  when 
he  was  in  the  Industrial  School  where  I 
put  him  with  such  a  breaking  of  the  heart 
when  he  was  only  ten  years  old.  He  has 
to  admit,  however,  that  even  his  own 
Machinists'  Union,  with  its  traditional 
trade  agreements  and  joint  boards,  is  far 
behind  our  experiment.  He  went  with  me 
to  the  banquet  on  May  Day.  We  had 
marched  through  the  Loop  in  celebration 
of  our   new   agreement   and   had   stirring 


INTEGRATING   INDUSTRY  iii 

speeches  at  the  Auditorium  in  the  after- 
noon, but  it  was  in  the  evening  that  we 
really  felt  at  home  with  each  other.  When 
he  saw  the  tremendous  enthusiasm  for  our 
beloved  leader  —  my  boy,  I  am  sorry  to 
say,  is  a  little  inclined  to  despise  foreigners 
and  also  tailors  because  they  aren't  as 
big  and  brawny  as  the  members  of  his 
dear  Machinists'  Union  —  and  really 
caught  some  notion  of  the  statesmanlike 
ability  required  for  the  successful  manage- 
ment of  such  a  complicated  and  difficult 
industrial  experiment,  and  when  he  real- 
ized that  the  ten  per  cent  increase  provided 
for  in  the  new  agreement  was  to  go  in 
greater  proportion  to  those  at  the  lower 
end  of  the  scale,  he  suddenly  forgot  his 
prejudices  and  I  saw  him  applauding  with 
his  hands  and  feet  as  if  he  had  really  let 
loose  at  last. 

;  "Of  course,  it  hasn't  been  easy  for  me 
even  during  these  later  years  to  keep  Helen 
in  school  and  to  support  my  aunt  who  is 
now  too  old  and  broken  even  to  keep  house 
for  us.  But  we  have  got  on,  and  quite 
aside  from  everything  else  I  am  thankful 


112     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

to  have  had  a  small  share  in  this  forward 
step  in  American  democracy  —  at  least, 
that's  what  they  called  it  at  the  banquet/* 
she  ended  shyly. 

The  experience  of  my  friend  bore  testi- 
mony that  in  spite  of  all  their  difficulties 
and  handicaps,  something  of  social  value  is 
forced  out  of  the  very  situation  itself 
among  that  vast  multitude  of  women  whose 
oppression  through  the  centuries  has  typi- 
fied a  sense  of  helpless  and  intolerable 
wrongs.  Many  of  them,  even  the  older 
ones,  are  being  made  slowly  conscious  of 
the  subtle  and  impalpable  filaments  that 
secretly  bind  their  experiences  and  moods 
into  larger  relations,  and  they  are  filled 
with  a  new  happiness  analogous  to  that  of 
little  children  when  they  are  first  taught 
to  join  hands  in  ordered  play. 

Is  such  enthusiastic  participation  in  or- 
ganized effort  but  one  manifestation  of 
that  desire  for  liberty  and  for  a  larger 
participation  in  life,  found  in  great  women's 
souls  all  over  the  world  ? 

In  pursuance  of  such  a  desire  the  working 
women  have  the  enormous   advantage   of 


INTEGRATING    INDUSTRY  113 

constant  association  with  each  other,  an 
advantage  dimly  perceived  even  by  pioneer 
women  two  hundred  years  ago. 

The  hostesses  of  the  famous  drawing- 
rooms  of  the  eighteenth  century  laid  great 
stress  on  human  intercourse  as  the  indi- 
vidual's best  means  of  cultivation.  Cer- 
tain French  women  gave  as  a  raison  d'etre 
for  their  brilliant  salons  that  *' people 
must  come  together  in  order  to  exercise 
justice,"  and  they  became  enormously 
proud  of  the  fact  that  by  the  end  of  the 
century  "all  Europe  was  thrown  into  a 
state  of  agitation  if  injustice  were  com- 
mitted in  any  corner  of  it." 

This  hypothesis  was  gallantly  laid  down 
a  hundred  years  before  the  industrial  revo- 
lution which,  in  its  consummation,  has  con- 
gregated millions  of  women  into  factories 
all  over  the  world.  These  myriad  women, 
most  of  them  young  and  untrained  and  all 
of  them  working  under  new  industrial  con- 
ditions, are  gradually  learning  to  "exer- 
cise justice"  if  only  because  they  have 
"come  together."  Their  association  has 
been  accomplished  under  the  stress  of  a 


114     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

common  necessity,  and  they  have  been 
tutored  in  a  mass  at  the  hard  school  of 
bitter  experience. 

Were  the  sheltered  drawing-room  ladies 
the  forerunners  of  such  contemporary  ad- 
vocates of  industrial  justice  or  do  we  find 
a  better  prototype  in  those  simple  old 
women  who,  having  reared  their  own  chil- 
dren and  having  come  to  be  regarded  as  a 
depository  for  domestic  wisdom,  dispense 
sound  advice  to  bewildered  mothers  which 
always  contains  the  admonition,  *' Never 
be  partial  to  any  one  of  them,  always  be 
as  just  as  you  know  how." 

Possibly  women's  organizations  of  all 
types  are  but  providing  ever-widening  chan- 
nels through  which  woman's  moral  energy 
may  flow,  revivifying  life  by  new  streams 
fed  in  the  upper  reaches  of  her  undis- 
covered capacities.  In  either  case,  we  may 
predict  that  to  control  old  impulses  so  that 
they  may  be  put  to  social  uses,  to  serve  the 
present  through  memories  hoarding  woman's 
genuine  experiences,  may  liberate  energies 
hitherto  unused  and  may  result  in  a  notable 
enrichment  of  the  pattern  of  human  culture. 


CHAPTER  V 

women's    memories  —  CHALLENGING   WAR 

I  WAS  sharply  reminded  of  an  obvious 
division  between  high  tradition  and  current 
conscience  in  several  conversations  I  held 
during  the  great  European  war  with  women 
who  had  sent  their  sons  to  the  front  in  un- 
questioning obedience  to  the  demands  of 
the  State,  but  who,  owing  to  their  own 
experiences,  had  found  themselves  in  the 
midst  of  that  ever-recurring  struggle,  often 
tragic  and  bitter,  between  two  conceptions 
of  duty,  one  of  which  is  antagonistic  to 
the  other. 

One  such  woman,^  who  had  long  been 
identified  with  the  care  of  delinquent  chil- 

^  The  following  conversation  is  a  composite  made  from 
several  talks  held  with  each  of  two  women  representing 
both  sides  of  the  conflict.  Their  opinions  and  observations 
are  merged  into  one  because  in  so  many  particulars  they 
were  either  identical  or  overlapping.  Both  women  called 
themselves  patriots,  but  each  had  become  convinced  of  the 
folly  of  war. 


Il6     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

dren  and  had  worked  for  many  years 
towards  the  estabhshment  of  a  Children's 
Court,  had  asked  me  many  questions  con- 
cerning the  psychopathic  chnic  in  the  Juve- 
nile Court  in  Chicago,  comparing  it  to  the 
brilliant  work  accomplished  in  her  own 
city  through  the  cooperation  of  the  univer- 
sity faculty.  The  Imperial  government 
itself  had  recently  recognized  the  value 
of  this  work  and  at  the  outbreak  of  the 
war  was  rapidly  developing  a  system 
through  which  the  defective  child  might  be 
discovered  early  in  his  school  career,  and 
might  not  only  be  saved  from  delinquency 
but  such  restricted  abilities  as  he  possessed 
be  trained  for  the  most  effective  use. 
"Through  all  these  years,"  she  said,  "I 
had  grown  accustomed  to  the  fact  that 
the  government  was  deeply  concerned  in 
the  welfare  of  the  least  promising  child. 
I  had  felt  my  own  efforts  so  identified  with 
it  that  I  had  unconsciously  come  to  regard 
the  government  as  an  agency  for  nurturing 
human  life  and  had  apparently  forgotten 
its  more  primitive  functions. 

"I  was  proud  of  the  fact  that  my  son 


CHALLENGING    WAR  117 

held  a  state  position  as  professor  of  Indus- 
trial Chemistry  in  the  University,  because 
I  knew  that  the  research  in  his  department 
would  ultimately  tend  to  alleviate  the 
harshness  of  factory  conditions,  and  to 
make  for  the  well-being  of  the  working 
classes  in  whose  children  I  had  become  so 
interested. 

"When  my  son's  regiment  was  mobilized 
and  sent  to  the  front  I  think  that  it  never 
occurred  to  me,  any  more  than  it  did  to 
him,  to  question  his  duty.  His  profes- 
sional training  made  him  a  valuable  mem- 
ber of  the  Aviation  Corps,  and  when,  in 
those  first  weeks  of  high  patriotism  his 
letters  reported  successful  scouting  or  even 
devastating  raids,  I  felt  only  a  solemn 
satisfaction.  But  gradually  through  the 
months,  when  always  more  of  the  people's 
food  supply  and  constantly  more  men 
were  taken  by  the  government  for  its 
military  purposes,  when  I  saw  the  state 
institutions  for  defectives  closed,  the 
schools  abridged  or  dismissed,  women  and 
children  put  to  work  in  factories  under 
hours    and    conditions    which    had    been 


Ii8     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

legally  prohibited  years  before,  when  the 
very  governmental  officials  who  had  been 
so  concerned  for  the  welfare  of  the  helpless 
were  bent  only  upon  the  destruction  of  the 
enemy  at  whatever  cost  to  their  fellow-citi- 
zens, the  State  itself  gradually  became  for 
me  an  alien  and  hostile  thing. 

"In  response  to  the  appeal  made  by  the 
government  to  the  instinct  of  self-pres- 
ervation, the  men  of  the  nation  were  ar- 
dent and  eager  to  take  any  possible  risks, 
to  suffer  every  hardship,  and  were  proud 
to  give  their  lives  in  their  country's  ser- 
vice. But  was  it  inevitable,  I  constantly 
asked  myself,  that  the  great  nations  of 
Europe  should  be  reduced  to  such  a  primi- 
tive appeal .?  Why  should  they  ignore  all 
the  other  motives  which  enter  into  modern 
patriotism  and  are  such  an  integral  part  of 
devotion  to  the  state  that  they  must  in 
the  end  be  reckoned  with .? 

"I  am  sure  that  I  had  reached  these 
conclusions  before  my  own  tragedy  came, 
before  my  son  was  fatally  wounded  in  a 
scouting  aeroplane  and  his  body  later 
thrown   overboard    into   a   lonely    swamp. 


CHALLENGING   WAR  119 

It  was  six  weeks  before  I  knew  what  had 
happened  and  it  was  during  that  period 
that  I  felt  most  strongly  the  folly  and 
waste  of  putting  men,  trained  as  my  son 
had  been,  to  the  barbaric  business  of  kill- 
ing. This  tendency  in  my  thinking  may 
have  been  due  to  a  hint  he  had  given  me 
in  the  very  last  letter  I  ever  received  from 
him,  of  a  change  that  was  taking  place 
within  himself.  He  wrote  that  whenever 
he  heard  the  firing  of  a  huge  field-piece  he 
knew  that  the  explosion  consumed  years 
of  the  taxes  which  had  been  slowly  ac- 
cumulated by  some  hard-working  farmer 
or  shopkeeper,  and  that  he  unconsciously 
calculated  how  fast  industrial  research 
would  have  gone  forward,  had  his  de- 
partment been  given  once  a  decade  the 
costs  of  a  single  day  of  warfare,  with  the 
government's  command  to  turn  back  into 
alleviation  of  industrial  conditions  the  taxes 
which  the  people  had  paid.  He  regretted 
that  he  was  so  accustomed  to  analysis  that 
his  mind  would  not  let  the  general  situ- 
ation alone  but  wearily  went  over  it  again 
and  again ;    and  then  he  added  that  this 


I20     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

war  was  tearing  down  the  conception  of 
government  which  had  been  so  carefully  de- 
veloped during  this  generation  in  the  minds 
of  the  very  men  who  had  worked  hardest 
to  fulfill  that  conception. 

"Although  the  letter  sounded  like  a 
treatise  on  government,  I  knew  there  was 
a  personal  pang  somewhere  behind  this 
sombre  writing,  even  though  he  added  his 
old  joking  promise  that  when  their  fathers 
were  no  longer  killed  in  industry,  he  would 
see  what  he  could  do  for  my  little  idiots. 

"At  the  very  end  of  the  letter  he  wrote, 
and  they  were  doubtless  the  last  words  he 
ever  penned,  that  he  felt  as  if  science  her- 
self in  this  mad  world  had  also  become 
cruel  and  malignant. 

"I  learned  later  that  it  was  at  this  time 
that  he  had  been  consulted  in  the  manu- 
facture of  asphyxiating  gases,  because  the 
same  gases  are  used  in  industry  and  he  had 
made  experiments  to  determine  their  poi- 
sonousness  in  different  degrees  of  dilution. 
The  original  investigation  with  which  he 
had  been  identified  had  been  carried  on 
that  the  fumes  released  in  a  certain  indus- 


CHALLENGING    WAR  121 

trial  process  might  be  prevented  from  in- 
juring the  men  who  worked  in  the  factory. 
I  know  how  hard  it  must  have  been  for 
him  to  put  knowledge  acquired  in  his  long 
efforts  to  protect  normal  living  to  the 
brutal  use  of  killing  men.  It  was  literally 
a  forced  act  of  prostitution." 

As  if  to  free  her  son's  memory  from  any 
charge  of  lack  of  patriotism,  after  a  few 
moments  she  continued  :  ''These  modern 
men  of  science  are  red-blooded,  devoted 
patriots,  facing  dangers  of  every  sort  in 
mines  and  factories  and  leading  strenuous 
lives  in  spite  of  the  popular  conception  of 
the  pale  anaemic  scholar,  but  because  they 
are  equally  interested  in  scientific  ex- 
periments wherever  they  may  be  carried 
on,  they  inevitably  cease  to  think  of 
national  boundaries  in  connection  with 
their  work.  The  international  mind,  which 
really  does  exist  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it 
is  not  yet  equipped  with  adequate  organs 
for  international  government,  has  become 
firmly  established,  at  least  among  scientists. 
They  have  known  the  daily  stimulus  of  a 
wide   and   free   range   of  contacts.     They 


122     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

have  become  interpenetrated  with  the 
human  consciousness  of  fellow  scientists 
all  over  the  world. 

*'I  hope  that  I  am  no  whining  coward 
—  my  son  gave  his  life  to  his  country  as 
many  another  brave  man  has  done,  but 
I  do  envy  the  mothers  whose  grief  is  at 
least  free  from  this  fearful  struggle  of 
opposing  ideals  and  traditions.  My  old 
father,  who  is  filled  with  a  solemn  pride 
over  his  grandson's  gallant  record  and 
death,  is  most  impatient  with  me.  I 
heard  him  telling  a  friend  the  other  day 
that  my  present  state  of  mind  was  a  pure 
demonstration  of  the  folly  of  higher  educa- 
tion for  women ;  that  it  was  preposterous 
and  more  than  human  flesh  could  bear  to 
combine  an  intellectual  question  on  the 
function  of  government  with  a  mother's 
sharp  agony  over  the  death  of  her  child. 
He  said  he  had  always  contended  that 
women,  at  least  those  who  bear  children, 
had  no  business  to  consider  questions  of 
this  sort,  and  that  the  good  sense  of  his 
position  was  demonstrated  now  that  such 
women  were  losing  their  children  in  war. 


CHALLENGING   WAR  123 

It  was  enough  for  women  to  know  that 
government  waged  war  to  protect  their 
firesides  and  to  preserve  the  nation  from 
annihilation ;  at  any  rate,  they  should 
keep  their  minds  free  from  silly  attempts 
to  reason  it  out.  It's  all  Bertha  von  Sutt- 
ner's  book  and  other  nonsense  that  the 
women  are  writing,  he  exploded  at  the  end.'* 
Then  as  if  she  were  following  another  line 
of  reminiscence  she  began  again.  "My  son 
left  behind  him  a  war  bride,  for  he  obeyed 
the  admonition  of  the  statesmen,  as  well  as 
the  commands  of  the  military  officers  in 
those  hurried  heroic  days.  But  the  hasty 
wooing  betrayed  all  his  ideals  of  marriage 
quite  as  fighting  men  of  other  nations  did 
violence  to  his  notions  of  patriotism,  and 
the  recklessness  of  a  destructive  air  raid 
outraged  his  long  devotion  to  science.  Of 
course  his  child  will  be  a  comfort  to  us  and 
his  poor  little  bride  is  filled  with  a  solemn 
patriotism  which  never  questions  any  as- 
pect of  the  situation.  When  she  comes  to 
see  us  and  I  listen  to  the  interminable  talk 
she  has  with  my  father,  I  am  grateful  for 
the  comfort  they  give  each  other,  but  when 


124     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

I  hear  them  repeating  those  hideous  stories 
of  the  conduct  of  the  enemy  which  ac- 
cumulate every  month  and  upon  which  the 
war  spirit  continually  feeds  itself,  I  with 
difficulty  refrain  from  crying  out  upon  them 
that  he  whose  courage  and  devotion  they 
praise  so  loudly  would  never  have  per- 
mitted such  talk  of  hatred  and  revenge  in 
his  presence ;  that  he  who  lived  in  the 
regions  of  science  and  whose  intrepid  mind 
was  bent  upon  the  conquest  of  truth,  must 
feel  that  he  had  died  in  vain  did  he  know 
to  what  exaggerations  and  errors  the  so- 
called  patriotism  of  his  beloved  country 
had  stooped. 

*'I  listen  to  them  thinking  that  if  I 
were  either  older  or  younger  it  would  not 
be  so  hard  for  me,  and  I  have  an  unreal 
impression  that  it  would  have  been  easier 
for  my  son  if  the  war  had  occurred  in  the 
first  flush  of  his  adventurous  youth.  Eager 
as  he  had  been  to  serve  his  country,  he 
would  not  then  have  asked  whether  it 
could  best  be  accomplished  by  losing  his 
life  in  a  scouting  aeroplane  or  by  dedicat- 
ing a  trained  mind  to  industrial  ameliora- 


CHALLENGING    WAR  125 

tion.  He  might  then  easily  have  preferred 
the  first  and  he  certainly  would  never 
have  been  tormented  by  doubts.  But 
when  he  was  thirty-one  years  old  and  had 
long  known  that  he  was  steadily  serving 
his  country  through  careful  researches,  the 
results  of  which  would  both  increase  the 
nation's  productivity  and  protect  its  hum- 
blest citizens,  he  could  not  do  otherwise 
than  to  judge  and  balance  social  values.  I 
am,  of  course,  proud  of  his  gallant  spirit, 
that  did  not  for  a  moment  regret  his  deci- 
sion to  die  for  his  country,  but  I  can  make 
the  sacrifice  seem  in  character  only  when  I 
place  him  back  in  his  early  youth. 

"At  times  I  feel  immeasurably  old,  and 
in  spite  of  my  father's  contention  that  I 
am  too  intellectual,  I  am  consciously  dom- 
inated by  one  of  those  overwhelming  im- 
pulses belonging  to  women  as  such,  irre- 
spective of  their  mental  training,  in  their 
revolt  against  war.  After  all,  why  should 
one  disregard  such  imperative  instincts.? 
We  know  perfectly  well  that  the  trend  of 
a  given  period  in  history  has  been  influenced 
by  *  habits  of  preference'  and  by  instinc- 


126     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

tive  actions  founded  upon  repeated  and  un- 
recorded experiences  of  an  analogous  kind  ; 
that  desires  to  seek  and  desires  to  avoid 
are  in  themselves  the  very  incalculable 
material  by  which  the  tendencies  of  an  age 
are  modified.  The  women  in  all  the  bel- 
ligerent countries  who  feel  so  alike  in  re- 
gard to  the  horror  and  human  waste  of 
this  war  and  yet  refrain  from  speaking  out, 
may  be  putting  into  jeopardy  that  power 
inherent  in  human  affairs  to  right  them- 
selves through  mankind's  instinctive  shift- 
ing towards  what  the  satisfactions  recom- 
mend and  the  antagonisms  repulse.  The 
expression  of  such  basic  impulses  in  regard 
to  human  relationships  may  be  most  im- 
portant in  this  moment  of  warfare  which 
is  itself  a  reversion  to  primitive  methods 
of  determining  relations  between  man  and 
man  or  nation  and  nation. 

"Certainly  the  women  in  every  country 
who  are  under  a  profound  imperative  to 
preserve  human  life,  have  a  right  to  regard 
this  maternal  impulse  as  important  now  as 
was  the  compelling  instinct  evinced  by 
primitive  women  long  ago,  when  they  made 


CHALLENGING   WAR  127 

the  first  crude  beginnings  of  society  by  re- 
fusing to  share  the  vagrant  hfe  of  man  be- 
cause they  insisted  upon  a  fixed  abode  in 
which  they  might  cherish  their  children. 
Undoubtedly  women  were  then  told  that 
the  interests  of  the  tribe,  the  diminishing 
food  supply,  the  honor  of  the  chieftain, 
demanded  that  they  leave  their  particular 
caves  and  go  out  in  the  wind  and  weather 
without  regard  to  the  survival  of  their 
children.  But  at  the  present  moment  the 
very  names  of  the  tribes  and  of  the  honors 
and  glories  which  they  sought  are  for- 
gotten, while  the  basic  fact  that  the  mothers 
held  the  lives  of  their  children  above  all 
else,  insisted  upon  staying  where  the  chil- 
dren had  a  chance  to  live,  and  cultivated 
the  earth  for  their  food,  laid  the  founda- 
tions of  an  ordered  society. 

My  son  used  to  say  that  my  scientific 
knowledge  was  most  irregular,  but  profound 
experiences  such  as  we  are  having  in  this  war 
throw  to  the  surface  of  one's  mind  all  sorts 
of  opinions  and  half-formed  conclusions. 
The  care  for  conventions,  for  agreement 
with  one's  friends,  is  burned  away.     One  is 


128     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

concerned  to  express  only  ultimate  con- 
viction even  though  it  may  differ  from  all 
the  rest  of  the  world.  This  is  true  in  spite 
of  the  knowledge  that  every  word  will  be 
caught  up  in  an  atmosphere  of  excitement 
and  of  that  nervous  irritability  which  is 
always  close  to  grief  and  to  moments  of  high 
emotion. 

*'In  the  face  of  many  distressing  mis- 
understandings I  am  certain  that  if  a 
minority  of  women  in  every  country  would 
clearly  express  their  convictions  they  would 
find  that  they  spoke  not  for  themselves 
alone  but  for  those  men  for  whom  the 
war  has  been  a  laceration,  —  'an  abdication 
of  the  spirit.'  Such  women  would  doubt- 
less formulate  the  scruples  of  certain  soldiers 
whose  'mouths  are  stopped  by  courage/ 
men  who  months  ago  with  closed  eyes 
rushed  to  the  defence  of  their  countries. 

"It  may  also  be  true  that  as  the  early 
days  of  this  war  fused  us  all  into  an  over- 
whelming sense  of  solidarity  until  each 
felt  absolutely  at  one  with  all  his  fellow- 
countrymen,  so  the  sensitiveness  to  differ- 
ences   is   greatly   intensified    and    the    dis- 


CHALLENGING    WAR  129 

senting  individual  has  an  exaggerated  sense 
of  isolation.  I  try  to  convince  myself  that 
this  is  the  explanation  of  my  abominable 
and  constant  loneliness,  which  is  almost 
unendurable. 

"I  have  never  been  a  Feminist  and 
have  always  remained  quite  unmoved  by 
the  talk  of  the  peculiar  contribution  women 
might  make  to  the  State,  but  during  the 
last  dreadful  months,  in  spite  of  women's 
widespread  enthusiasm  for  the  war  and 
their  patriotic  eagerness  to  make  the  su- 
preme sacrifice,  I  have  become  conscious  of 
an  unalterable  cleavage  between  Militarism 
and  Feminism.  The  Militarists  believe  that 
government  finally  rests  upon  a  basis  of 
physical  force,  and  in  a  crisis  such  as  this. 
Militarism,  in  spite  of  the  spiritual  passion 
in  war,  finds  its  expression  in  the  crudest 
forms  of  violence. 

*'It  would  be  absurd  for  women  even  to 
suggest  equal  rights  in  a  world  governed 
solely  by  physical  force,  and  Feminism  must 
necessarily  assert  the  ultimate  supremacy 
of  moral  agencies.  Inevitably  the  two  are 
in  eternal  opposition. 


I30     LONG    ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

"I  have  always  agreed  with  the  Fem- 
inists that,  so  far  as  force  plays  a  great  part 
in  the  maintenance  of  an  actual  social  order, 
it  is  due  to  the  presence  of  those  elements 
which  are  in  a  steady  process  of  elimination  ; 
and  of  course  as  society  progresses  the 
difficulty  arising  from  woman's  inferiority 
in  physical  strength  must  become  propor- 
tionately less.  One  of  the  most  wretched 
consequences  of  war  is  that  it  arrests  these 
beneficent  social  processes  and  throws 
everything  back  into  a  coarser  mould.  The 
fury  of  war,  enduring  but  for  a  few  months 
or  years,  may  destroy  slow-growing  social 
products  which  it  will  take  a  century  to 
recreate  —  the  'consent  of  the  governed,' 
for  instance.  .  .  . 

But  why  do  I  talk  like  this  !  My  father 
would  call  it  one  of  my  untrained  and 
absurd  theories  about  social  progress  and 
the  functions  of  government  concerning 
which  I  know  nothing,  and  would  say 
that  I  had  no  right  to  discuss  the  matter 
in  this  time  of  desperate  struggle.  Never- 
theless it  is  better  for  me  in  these  hideous 
long  days  and  nights  to  drive   my  mind 


CHALLENGING   WAR  131 

forward  even  to  absurd  conclusions  than 
to  let  it  fall  into  one  of  those  vicious  circles 
in  which  it  goes  round  and  round  to  no 
purpose." 

In  absolute  contrast  to  this  sophisti- 
cated, possibly  oversophisticated,  mother 
was  a  simple  woman  who  piteously  showed 
me  a  piece  of  shrapnel  taken  from  her  son's 
body  by  his  comrades,  which  they  had 
brought  home  to  her  in  a  literal-minded  at- 
tempt at  comfort.  They  had  told  her  that 
the  shrapnel  was  made  in  America  and  she 
showed  it  to  me,  believing  that  I  could  at 
sight  recognize  the  manufactured  products 
of  my  fellow-countrymen.  She  apparently 
wished  to  have  the  statement  either  con- 
firmed or  denied,  because  she  was  utterly 
bewildered  in  her  feeling  about  the  United 
States  and  all  her  previous  associations  with 
it.  In  her  fresh  grief,  stricken  as  she  was, 
she  was  bewildered  by  a  sudden  reversal 
of  her  former  ideals.  Many  of  her  rela- 
tives had  long  ago  emigrated  to  America, 
including  two  brothers  living  in  the  Western 
states,  whom  she  had  hoped  to  visit  in  her 
old   age.     For  many   reasons,   throughout 


132     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

her  youth  and  early  womanhood,  she  had 
thought  of  that  far-away  country  as  a 
kindly  place  where  every  man  was  given 
his  chance  and  where  the  people  were  all 
friendly  to  each  other  irrespective  of  the 
land  in  which  they  had  been  born.  To 
have  these  same  American  people  send 
back  the  ammunition  which  had  killed  her 
son  was  apparently  incomprehensible  to  her. 
She  presented,  it  seemed  to  me,  a  clear 
case  of  that  humble  internationalism  which 
is  founded  not  upon  theories,  but  upon 
the  widespread  immigration  of  the  last 
fifty  years,  interlacing  nation  to  nation 
with  a  thousand  kindly  deeds.  Her  older 
brother  had  a  fruit  ranch  which  bordered 
upon  one  of  those  co-operative  Italian  col- 
onies so  successful  in  California,  and  he 
had  frequently  sent  home  presents  from 
his  Italian  neighbors  with  his  own  little 
cargoes.  The  whole  had  evidently  been 
prized  by  his  family  as  a  symbol  of  Ameri- 
can good-will  and  of  unbounded  opportu- 
nity. Her  younger  brother  had  attained 
some  measure  of  success  as  a  contractor  in 
an  inland  town,  and  when  he  had  written 


CHALLENGING    WAR  133 

home  of  the  polyglot  composition  of  the 
gangs  of  men  upon  whose  labors  his  little 
fortune  had  been  founded,  she  had  taken 
it  as  an  example  of  all  nationalities  and 
religions  working  happily  together.  He 
had  also  served  one  term  as  mayor,  ob- 
viously having  been  elected  through  his 
popularity  with  the  same  foreign  colonies 
from  which  his  employes  had  been  drawn. 
For  many  reasons  therefore  she  had  vis- 
ualized America  as  a  land  in  which  all 
nationalities  understood  each  other  with  a 
resulting  friendliness  which  was  not  pos- 
sible in  Europe,  not  because  the  people 
still  living  in  Europe  were  different  from 
those  who  had  gone  to  America,  but  be- 
cause the  latter,  having  emigrated,  had  a 
chance  to  express  their  natural  good-will 
for  everybody.  The  nations  at  war  in 
Europe  suggested  to  her  simple  mind  the 
long  past  days  of  her  grandmother's  youth 
when  a  Protestant  threw  stones  at  a  Cath- 
olic just  because  he  was  "different."  The 
religious  liberty  in  America  was  evidently 
confused  in  her  mind  with  this  other 
liberalism  in  regard  to  national  differences. 


134     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

Holding  this  conception  of  actual  in- 
ternationalism as  it  had  been  evolved 
among  simple  people,  crude  and  abortive 
though  it  was,  she  had  been  much  more 
shocked  by  the  fact  that  friendly  Americans 
should  make  ammunition  to  be  used  for 
killing  any  human  being  than  by  the 
actual  war  itself,  because  the  war  was 
taking  place  in  Europe,  where  it  was  still 
quite  natural  for  a  German  to  fight  against 
a  Frenchman  or  an  Italian  against  an 
Austrian. 

Her  son  had  been  a  Socialist  and  from 
the  discussions  he  sometimes  held  with 
his  comrades  in  her  house,  she  had  grown 
familiar  with  certain  phrases  which  she  had 
taken  literally  and  in  some  curious  fashion 
had  solemnly  come  to  believe  were  put 
into  practice  in  her  El  Dorado  of  America. 

The  arguments  I  had  used  so  many 
times  with  her  fellow-countrymen  to  justify 
America's  sale  of  ammunition,  ponderously 
beginning  with  The  Hague  conventions 
of  1907,  I  found  useless  in  the  face  of 
this  idealistic  version  of  America's  good- 
will. 


CHALLENGING   WAR  135 

She  was  evidently  one  of  those  people 
whose  affections  go  out  to  groups  and  im- 
personal causes  quite  as  much  as  to  indi- 
viduals, thus  often  supplementing  and 
enlarging  harsh  and  narrow  conditions  of 
living.  She  certainly  obtained  a  curiously 
personal  comfort  out  of  her  idealization  of 
America.  Her  conversation  revealed  what 
I  had  often  vaguely  felt  before  when  men 
as  well  as  women  talked  freely  of  the  war, 
that  her  feelings  had  been  hurt,  that  her 
very  conception  of  human  nature  had  re- 
ceived a  sharp  shock  and  set-back.  To  her 
the  whole  world  and  America  in  particular 
would  henceforth  seem  less  kind  and  her 
spirit  would  be  less  at  home.  She  was 
tormented  by  that  ever  recurring  question 
which  perhaps  can  never  be  answered  for 
any  of  us  too  confidently  in  the  affirmative, 
"Is  the  Universe  friendly  .?"  The  troubled 
anguish  in  her  old  eyes  confirmed  her 
statement  that  the  thought  of  the  multi- 
tude of  men  who  were  being  killed  all 
over  the  world  oppressed  her  day  and 
night.  This  old  woman  had  remained 
faithful   to   the  cause  of  moral  unity  and 


136     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

bore  her  humble  testimony  to  one  of  the 
noblest  and  profoundest  needs  of  the  human 
spirit. 

These  efforts  at  spiritual  adjustment 
necessitated  by  the  war  are  attempted  by 
many  people,  from  the  simple  souls  whose 
hard-won  conceptions  of  a  friendly  universe 
have  been  brought  tumbling  about  their 
ears,  to  the  thinking  men  who  are  openly 
disappointed  to  find  civilized  nations  so 
irrational.  Such  efforts  are  encountered 
in  all  the  belligerent  nations  as  well  as  in 
the  neutral  ones,  although  in  the  former 
they  are  often  inhibited  and  overlaid  by 
an  overwhelming  patriotism.  Neverthe- 
less, as  I  met  those  women  who  were  bearing 
their  hardships  and  sorrows  so  courage- 
ously, I  often  caught  a  glimpse  of  an  in- 
ner struggle,  as  if  two  of  the  most  funda- 
mental instincts,  the  two  responsible  for 
our  very  development  as  human  beings, 
were  at  strife  with  each  other.  The  first 
is  tribal  loyalty,  such  unquestioning  ac- 
ceptance of  the  tribe's  morals  and  stand- 
ards that  the  individual  automatically  fights 
when    the    word    comes ;     the    second    is 


CHALLENGING    WAR  137 

woman's  deepest  instinct,  that  the  child 
of  her  body  must  be  made  to  Hve. 

We  are  told  that  the  peasants  in  Flanders, 
whose  fields  border  upon  the  very  trenches, 
disconsolately  came  back  to  them  last 
Spring  and  continued  to  plough  the  familiar 
soil,  regardless  of  the  rain  of  shrapnel  fall- 
ing into  the  fresh  furrows ;  that  the  wine 
growers  of  Champagne  last  Autumn  in- 
sistently gathered  their  ripened  grapes, 
though  the  bombs  of  rival  armies  were 
exploding  in  their  vineyards ;  why  should 
it  then  be  surprising  that  certain  women 
in  every  country  have  remained  steadfast 
to  their  old  occupation  of  nurturing  life, 
that  they  have  tenaciously  held  to  their 
anxious  concern  that  men  should  live, 
through  all  the  contagion  and  madness  of 
the  war  fever  which  is  infecting  the  nations 
of  the  earth. 

In  its  various  manifestations  the  strug- 
gle in  women's  souls  suggests  one  of  those 
movements  through  which,  at  long  his- 
toric intervals,  the  human  spirit  has  ap- 
parently led  a  revolt  against  itself,  as  it 
were,    exhibiting    a    moral    abhorrence    for 


138     LONG   ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

certain  cherished  customs  which,  up  to 
that  time,  had  been  its  finest  expression. 
A  moral  rebelhon  of  this  sort  was  inaugu- 
rated three  thousand  years  ago  both  in 
Greece  and  Judea  against  the  old  custom 
of  human  sacrifice.  That  a  man  should 
slay  his  own  child  and  stand  unmoved 
as  the  burning  flesh  arose  to  his  gods 
was  an  act  of  piety,  of  courage,  and  of 
devotion  to  ideals,  so  long  as  he  performed 
the  rite  wholeheartedly.  But  after  there 
had  gradually  grown  up  in  the  minds  of 
men  first  the  suspicion,  and  then  the  con- 
viction, that  it  was  unnecessary  and  im- 
pious to  offer  human  flesh  as  a  living  sac- 
rifice, courage  and  piety  shifted  to  the 
men  who  refused  to  conform  to  this  long- 
established  custom.  At  last  both  the  Greeks 
and  the  Jews  guarded  themselves  against 
the  practice  of  human  sacrifice  with  every 
possible  device.  It  gradually  became  ut- 
terly abhorrent  to  all  civilized  peoples,  an 
outrage  against  the  elemental  decencies,  a 
profound  disturber  of  basic  human  rela- 
tions. Poets  and  prophets  were  moved 
to  call  it  an  abomination ;   statesmen  and 


CHALLENGING   WAR  139 

teachers  denounced  it  as  a  hideous  bar- 
barism, until  now  it  is  so  nearly  abolished 
by  the  entire  race  that  it  is  no  longer 
found  within  the  borders  of  civilization  and 
exists  to-day  only  in  jungles  and  hidden 
savage  places. 

There  are  indications  that  the  human 
consciousness  is  reaching  the  same  stage 
of  sensitiveness  in  regard  to  war  as  that 
which  has  been  attained  in  regard  to  human 
sacrifice.  In  this  moment  of  almost  uni- 
versal warfare  there  is  evinced  a  widespread 
moral  abhorrence  against  war,  as  if  its  very 
existence  were  more  than  human  nature 
could  endure.  Citizens  of  every  nation  are 
expressing  this  moral  compunction,  which 
they  find  in  sharp  conflict  with  current 
conceptions  of  patriotic  duty.  It  is  per- 
haps inevitable  that  women  should  be 
challenged  in  regard  to  it,  should  be  called 
upon  to  give  it  expression  in  such  stirring 
words  as  those  addressed  to  them  by 
Romain  Rolland,  "Cease  to  be  the  shadow 
of  man  and  of  his  passion  of  pride  and 
destruction.  Have  a  clear  vision  of  the 
duty  of  pity !     Be  a  living  peace  in  the 


I40     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

midst  of  war  —  the  eternal  Antigone  re- 
fusing to  give  herself  up  to  hatred  and 
knowing  no  distinction  between  her  suffer- 
ing brothers  who  make  war  on  each  other." 
This  may  be  a  call  to  women  to  defend 
those  at  the  bottom  of  society  who,  irrespec- 
tive of  the  victory  or  defeat  of  any  army, 
are  ever  oppressed  and  overburdened.  The 
suffering  mothers  of  the  disinherited  feel 
the  stirring  of  the  old  impulse  to  protect 
and  cherish  their  unfortunate  children,  and 
women's  haunting  memories  instinctively 
challenge  war  as  the  implacable  enemy  of 
their  age-long  undertaking. 


CHAPTER  VI 

A    PERSONAL    EXPERIENCE    IN    INTERPRE- 
TATIVE   MEMORY 

Several  years  ago,  during  a  winter  spent 
in  Egypt,  I  found  within  myself  an  unex- 
pected tendency  to  interpret  racial  and 
historic  experiences  through  personal  rem- 
iniscences. I  am  therefore  venturing  to 
record  in  this  closing  chapter  my  inevitable 
conclusion  that  a  sincere  portrayal  of  a 
widespread  and  basic  emotional  experience, 
however  remote  in  point  of  time  it  may  be, 
has  the  power  overwhelmingly  to  evoke 
memories  of  like  moods  in  the  individual. 

The  unexpected  revival  in  my  memory 
of  long-forgotten  experiences  may  have 
been  due  partly  to  the  fact  that  we  have 
so  long  been  taught  that  the  temples  and 
tombs  of  ancient  Egypt  are  the  very  earliest 
of  the  surviving  records  of  ideas  and  men, 
that   we    approach    them   with    a    certain 

141 


142     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

sense  of  familiarity,  quite  ready  to  claim 
a  share  in  these  "family  papers  and  title 
deeds  of  the  race." 

We  also  consider  it  probable  that  these 
primitive  human  records  will  stir  within 
us  certain  early  states  of  consciousness, 
having  learned,  with  the  readiness  which  so 
quickly  attaches  itself  to  the  pseudo-sci- 
entific phrase,  that  every  child  repeats  in 
himself  the  history  of  the  race.  Never- 
theless, what  I,  at  least,  was  totally  un- 
prepared to  encounter,  was  the  constant 
revival  of  primitive  and  overpowering  emo- 
tions which  I  had  experienced  so  long  ago 
that  they  had  become  absolutely  detached 
from  myself  and  seemed  to  belong  to 
some  one  else — to  a  small  person  with  whom 
I  was  no  longer  intimate,  and  who  was 
certainly  not  in  the  least  responsible  for 
my  present  convictions  and  reflections. 
It  gradually  became  obvious  that  the 
ancient  Egyptians  had  known  this  small 
person  quite  intimately  and  had  most 
seriously  and  naively  set  down  upon  the 
walls  of  their  temples  and  tombs  her  ear- 
liest reactions  in  the  presence  of  death. 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         143 

At  moments  my  adult  intelligence  would 
be  unexpectedly  submerged  by  the  emo- 
tional message  which  was  written  there. 
Rising  to  the  surface  like  a  flood,  this 
primitive  emotion  would  sweep  away  both 
the  historic  record  and  the  adult  conscious- 
ness interested  in  it,  leaving  only  a  child's 
mind  struggling  through  an  experience 
which  it  found  overwhelming. 

It  may  have  been  because  these  records 
of  the  early  Egyptians  are  so  endlessly 
preoccupied  with  death,  portraying  man's 
earliest  efforts  to  defeat  it,  his  eager  de- 
sire to  survive,  to  enter  by  force  or  by 
guile  into  the  heavens  of  the  western  sky, 
that  the  mind  is  pushed  back  into  that 
earliest  childhood  when  the  existence  of  the 
soul,  its  exact  place  of  residence  in  the  body, 
its  experiences  immediately  after  death, 
its  journeyings  upward,  its  relation  to  its 
guardian  angel,  so  often  afforded  material 
for  the  crudest  speculation.  In  the  ob- 
scure renewal  of  these  childish  fancies, 
there  is  nothing  that  is  definite  enough  to 
be  called  memory ;  it  is  rather  that  Egypt 
reproduces  a  state  of  consciousness  which 


144     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

has  so  absolutely  passed  into  oblivion  that 
only  the  most  powerful  stimuli  could  re- 
vive it. 

This  revival  doubtless  occurs  more  easily 
because  these  early  records  in  relief  and 
color  not  only  suggest  in  their  subject- 
matter  that  a  child  has  been  endowed  with 
sufficient  self-consciousness  to  wish  to  write 
down  his  own  state  of  mind  upon  a  wall, 
but  also  because  the  very  primitive  style 
of  drawing  to  which  the  Egyptians  adhered 
long  after  they  had  acquired  a  high  degree 
of  artistic  freedom,  is  the  most  natural 
technique  through  which  to  convey  so 
simple  and  archaic  a  message.  The  square 
shoulders  of  the  men,  the  stairways  done 
in  profile,  and  a  hundred  other  details, 
constantly  remind  one  of  a  child's  draw- 
ings. It  is  as  if  the  Egyptians  had  pains- 
takingly portrayed  everything  that  a  child 
has  felt  in  regard  to  death,  and  having,  dur- 
ing the  process,  gradually  discovered  the 
style  of  drawing  naturally  employed  by  a 
child,  had  deliberately  stiffened  it  into  an 
unchanging  convention.  The  result  is  that 
the   traveller,    reading    in    these   drawings 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         145 

which  stretch  the  length  of  three  thousand 
years,  the  long  endeavor  to  overcome 
death,  finds  that  the  experience  of  the  two  — 
the  child  and  the  primitive  people  —  often 
become  confused,  or  rather  that  they  are 
curiously  interrelated. 

This  begins  from  the  moment  the  trav- 
eller discovers  that  the  earliest  tombs  sur- 
viving in  Egypt,  the  mastabas,  —  which 
resemble  the  natural  results  of  a  child's 
first  effort  to  place  one  stone  upon  another, 
—  are  concerned  only  with  size,  as  if  that 
early  crude  belief  in  the  power  of  physical 
bulk  to  protect  the  terrified  human  being 
against  all  shadowy  evils  were  absolutely 
instinctive  and  universal.  The  mastabas 
gradually  develop  into  the  pyramids,  of 
which  Breasted  says  that  "they  are  not 
only  the  earliest  emergence  of  organized 
men  and  the  triumph  of  concerted  effort, 
they  are  likewise  a  silent,  but  eloquent, 
expression  of  the  supreme  endeavor  to 
achieve  immortality  by  sheer  physical 
force."  Both  the  mastabas  at  Sahkara 
and  the  pyramids  at  Gizeh,  in  the  sense 
of  Tolstoy's  definition  of  art  as  that  which 


146     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

reproduces  in  the  spectator  the  state  of 
consciousness  of  the  artist,  at  once  appeal 
to  the  child  surviving  in  every  adult,  who 
insists  irrationally,  after  the  manner  of 
children,  upon  sympathizing  with  the  at- 
tempt to  shut  out  death  by  strong  walls. 

Certainly  we  can  all  vaguely  remember, 
when  death  itself,  or  stories  of  ghosts,  had 
come  to  our  intimate  child's  circle,  that 
we  went  about  saying  to  ourselves  that 
we  were  "not  afraid,"  that  it  ''could  not 
come  here,"  that  "the  door  was  locked, 
the  windows  tight  shut,"  that  "this  was  a 
big  house,"  and  a  great  deal  more  talk  of 
a  similar  sort.  ui>  iftnny^^i. 

In  the  presence  of  these  primitive^  at- 
tempts to  defeat  death,  and  without  the 
conscious  aid  of  memory,  I  found  myself 
living  over  the  emotions  of  a  child  six  years 
old,  saying  some  such  words  as  I  sat  on  the 
middle  of  the  stairway  in  my  own  home, 
which  yet  seemed  alien  because  all  the 
members  of  the  family  had  gone  to  the 
funeral  of  a  relative  and  would  not  be 
back  until  evening,  "long  after  you  are  in 
bed,"  they  had  said.     In  this  moment  of 


Y:lOi/.   INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY'  1      I47 

loneliness  and  horror,  I  depended  absolutely 
upon  the  brick  walls  of  the  house  to  keep 
out  the  prowling  terror,  and  neither  the 
talk  of  kindly  Polly,  who  awkwardly  and 
unsuccessfully  reduced  an  unwieldy  the- 
ology to  child-language,  nor  the  strings  of 
paper  dolls  cut  by  a  visitor,  gave  me  the 
slightest  comfort.  Only  the  blank  wall  of 
the  stairway  seemed  to  afford  protection  in 
this  bleak  moment  against  the  formless 
peril. 

Doubtless  these  huge  tombs  were  built 
to  preserve  from  destruction  the  royal 
bodies  which  were  hidden  within  them  at 
the  end  of  tortuous  and  carefully  con- 
cealed passages ;  but  both  the  gigantic 
structures  in  the  vicinity  of  Memphis,  and 
the  everlasting  hills,  which  were  later 
utilized  at  Thebes,  inevitably  give  the  im- 
pression that  death  is  defied  and  shut  out 
by  massive  defences. 

Even  when  the  traveller  sees  that  the 
Egyptians  defeated  their  object  by  the 
very  success  of  the  Gizeh  pyramids  — for 
when  their  overwhelming  bulk  could  not 
be  enlarged  and  their  bewildering  labyrinths 


148     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

could  not  be  multiplied,  effort  along  that 
line  perforce  ceased  —  there  is  something 
in  the  next  attempt  of  the  Egyptians  to 
overcome  death  which  the  child  within  us 
again  recognizes  as  an  old  experience. 
One  who  takes  pains  to  inquire  concerning 
the  meaning  of  the  texts  which  were  in- 
scribed on  the  inner  walls  of  the  pyramids 
and  the  early  tombs,  finds  that  the  familiar 
terror  of  death  is  still  there  although  ex- 
pressed somewhat  more  subtly ;  that  the 
Egyptians  are  trying  to  outwit  death  by 
magic  tricks. 

These  texts  are  designed  to  teach  the 
rites  that  redeem  a  man  from  death  and 
insure  his  continuance  of  life,  not  only 
beyond  the  grave  but  in  the  grave  itself. 
"He  who  sayeth  this  chapter  and  who  has 
been  justified  in  the  waters  of  Natron,  he 
shall  come  forth  the  day  after  his  burial.'* 
Because  to  recite  them  was  to  fight  suc- 
cessfully against  the  enemies  of  the  dead, 
these  texts  came  to  be  inscribed  on  tombs, 
on  coffins,  and  on  the  papyrus  hung  around 
the  neck  of  a  mummy.  But  woe  to  the 
man  who  was   buried  without  the   texts: 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         149 

"He  who  knoweth  not  this  chapter  cannot 
come  forth  by  day."  Access  to  Paradise 
and  all  its  joys  was  granted  to  any  one, 
good  or  bad,  who  knew  the  formulae,  for 
in  the  first  stages  of  Egyptian  develop- 
ment, as  in  all  other  civilizations,  the  gods 
did  not  concern  themselves  with  the  con- 
duct of  a  man  toward  other  men,  but  solely 
with  his  duty  to  the  gods  themselves. 

The  magic  formulae  alone  afforded  pro- 
tection against  the  shadowy  dangers  await- 
ing the  dead  man  when  first  he  entered 
the  next  world  and  enabled  him  to  over- 
come the  difficulties  of  his  journey.  The 
texts  taught  him  how  to  impersonate  par- 
ticular gods  and  by  this  subterfuge  to  over- 
come the  various  foes  he  must  encounter, 
because  these  foes,  having  at  one  time  been 
overcome  by  the  gods,  were  easily  terrified 
by  such  pretence. 

When  I  found  myself  curiously  sympa- 
thetic with  this  desire  "to  pretend,"  and 
with  the  eager  emphasis  attached  by  the 
Egyptians  to  their  magic  formulae,  I  was 
inclined  to  put  it  down  to  that  secret  sympa- 
thy with  magic  by  means  of  which  all  chil- 


150     LONG    ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

dren,  in  moments  of  rebellion  against  a 
humdrum  world,  hope  to  wrest  something 
startling  and  thrilling  out  of  the  environing 
realm  of  the  supernatural ;  but  beyond  a 
kinship  with  this  desire  to  placate  the  evil 
one,  to  overcome  him  by  mysterious  words, 
I  found  it  baffling  to  trace  my  sympathy  to 
a  definite  experience.  Gradually,  however, 
it  emerged,  blurred  in  certain  details,  sur- 
prisingly alive  in  others,  but  all  of  it  suf- 
fused with  the  selfsame  emotions  which 
impelled  the  Egyptian  to  write  his  Book  of 
the  Dead.  ijiiV;//  .aju  .>.., 

To  describe  it  as  a  spiritual'  struggle  is 
to  use  much  too  dignified  and  definite  a 
term;  it  was  the  prolonged  emotional 
stress  throughout  one  cold  winter  when  re- 
vival services — ^  protracted  meetings,  they 
were  then  called  —  were  held  in  the  vil- 
lage church  night  after  night.  I  was,  of 
course,  not  permitted  to  attend  them,  but 
I  heard  them  talked  about  a  great  deal  by 
simple  adults  and  children,  who  told  of 
those  who  shouted  aloud  for  joy,  cr  lay  on 
the  floor  "stiff  with  power"  because  they 
vviefce  i  saved ;    and  of  others  —  it  was  for 


Y5if)MlINTERPRETATrVE    MEMORY'  '      1-5% 

those  others  that  my  heart  was  wrung  — 
who,  although  they  wrestled  with  the 
spirit  until  midnight  and  cried  out  that 
they  felt  the  hot  breath  of  hell  upon  their 
cheeks,  could  not  find  salvation.  Would 
it  do  to  pretend  ?  I  anxiously  a:sked  my- 
self, why  didn't  they  say  the  right  words  so 
that  they  could  get  up  from  the  mburners' 
bench  and  sit  with  the  other  people,  who 
must  feel  so  sorry  for  them  that  they 
would  let  them  pretend  ?  What  were  these 
words  that  made  such  a  difference  that  to 
say  them  was  an  assurance  of  heavenly 
bliss,  but  if  you  failed  to  say  them  you 
burned  in  hell  forever  and  ever  ?  Was 
the  preacher  the  only  one  who  knew  them 
for  sure?  Was  it  possible  to  find  them 
without  first  kneeling  at  the  mourners' 
bench  and  groaning  ?  These  words  must 
certainly  be  in  the  Bible  somewhere,  and  if 
one  read  it  out  loud  all  through,  every 
word,  one  must  surely  say  the  right  words 
in  time ;  but  if  one  died  before  one  was 
grown  up  enough  to  read  the  Bible  through 
— -  to-night,  for  instance  —  what  would  hap- 
pen then  ?     Surely  nothing  else  could  be  so 


152     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

important  as  these  words  of  salvation. 
While  I  did  not  exactly  scheme  to  secure 
them,  I  was  certainly  restrained  only  by 
my  impotence,  and  I  anxiously  inquired 
from  everyone  what  these  magic  words 
might  be ;  and  only  gradually  did  this 
childish  search  for  magic  protection  from 
the  terrors  after  death  imperceptibly  merge 
into  a  concern  for  the  fate  of  the  soul. 

Perhaps,  because  it  is  so  impossible  to 
classify  one's  own  childish  experiences  or 
to  put  them  into  chronological  order,  the 
traveller  at  no  time  feels  a  lack  of  consist- 
ency in  the  complicated  attitude  toward 
death  which  is  portrayed  on  the  walls  of 
the  Egyptian  temples  and  tombs.  Much 
of  it  seems  curiously  familiar ;  from  the 
earliest  times,  the  Egyptians  held  the  be- 
lief that  there  is  in  man  a  permanent  ele- 
ment which  survives  —  it  is  the  double,  the 
Ka,  the  natural  soul  in  contradistinction 
to  the  spiritual  soul,  which  fits  exactly 
into  the  shape  of  the  body  but  is  not 
blended  with  it.  In  order  to  save  this 
double  from  destruction,  the  body  must  be 
preserved  in  a  recognizable  form. 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         153 

i 

This  insistence  upon  the  preservation  of 
the  body  among  the  Egyptians,  antedating 
their  faith  in  magic  formulae,  clearly  had 
its  origin,  as  in  the  case  of  the  child,  in  a 
desperate  revolt  against  the  destruction  of 
the  visible  man. 

Owing  to  this  continued  insistence  upon 
corporeal  survival,  the  Egyptians  at  length 
carried  the  art  of  embalming  to  such  a 
state  of  perfection  that  mummies  of  royal 
personages  are  easily  recognized  from  their 
likenesses  to  portrait  statues.  Such  con- 
fidence did  they  have  in  their  own  increas- 
ing ability  to  withhold  the  human  frame 
from  destruction  that  many  of  the  texts 
inscribed  on  the  walls  of  the  tombs  assure 
the  dead  man  himself  that  he  is  not  dead, 
and  endeavor  to  convince  his  survivors 
against  the  testimony  of  their  own  senses  ; 
or  rather,  they  attempt  to  deceive  the 
senses.  The  texts  endlessly  repeat  the  same 
assertion,  "Thou  comest  not  dead  to  thy 
sepulchre,  thou  comest  living" ;  and  yet 
the  very  reiteration,  as  well  as  the  decora- 
tions upon  the  walls  of  every  tomb,  portray 
a  primitive  terror  lest  after  all  the  body  be 


154     LONG    RO'XO'dt''  WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

destroyed  and  the  element  of  life  be  lost 
forever.  One's  throat  goes  dry  over  this 
old  fear  of  death  expressed  by  men  who 
have  been  so  long  dead  that  there  is  no 
record  of  them  but  this,  no  surviving  docu- 
ment of  their  once  keen  reactions  to  life. 
'^'^'Doubtless  the  Egyptians  in  time  over- 
came this  primitive  fear  concerning  the  dis- 
appearance of  the  body,  as  we  all  do,  al- 
though each  individual  is  destined  to  the 
same  devastating  experience.  The  memory 
of  mine  came  back  to  me  vividly  as  I  stood 
in  an  Egyptian  tomb :  I  was  a  tiny  child 
making  pothooks  in  the  village  school, 
when  one  day  —  it  must  have  been  in  the 
full  flush  of  Spring,  for  I  remember  the 
crab-apple  blossoms — during  the  afternoon 
session;^  the  "A  B'  G  tlass  was  told  that  its 
members  would  march  all  together  to  the 
burial  of  the  mother  of  one  of  the  littlest 
girls.  Of  course,  I  had  been  properly- 
taught  that  people  went  to  heaven  when 
they  died  and  that,  their  bodies  were  buried 
in  the  cemetery,  but  I  was  not  at  all  clear 
about  it,  and  I  was  certainly  totally  un- 
prepared to  see  what  appeared  to  be  the 


Y30J/  IMTERPRETATIVE^MEMORY         155 

person  herself  put  deep  down  into  the 
ground.  The  knowledge  came  to  me  so 
suddenly  and  brutally  that  for  weeks  after- 
ward the  days  were  heavy  with  a  nameless 
oppression  and  the  nights  were  filled  with 
horror.  ^    ^  .    - . 

The  cemetery;  was  hard  by:  the  school- 
house,  placed  there,  it  had  always  been 
whispered  among  us,  to  make  the  bad 
boys  afraid.  Thither  the  A  B  G  class,  in 
awestruck  procession,  each  child  carefully 
holding  the  hand  of  another,  was  l^.d  by 
the  teacher  to  the  edge  of  the  open  grave 
and  bidden  to  look  on  the  still  face  of  the 
little  girl's  mother. 

Our  poor  knees  quaked  and  quavered  as 
we  stood  shelterless  and  unattended  by 
family  protection  or  even  by  friendly  grown- 
ups ;  for  the  one  tall  teacher,  while  clearly 
visible,  seemed  inexpressively  far  away  as 
we  kept  an  uncertain  footing  on  the  freshly 
spaded  earth,  hearing  the  preacher's  voice, 
the  sobs  of  the  motherless  children,  and, 
crowning  horror  of  all,  the  hollow  sound  of 
three  clods  of  earth  dropped  impressively 
upon  the  coffin  lid.;     '  mi  h  uTfii 


156     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

After  endless  ages  the  service  was  over 
and  we  were  allowed  to  go  down  the  long 
hill  into  the  familiar  life  of  the  village. 
But  a  new  terror  awaited  me  even  there, 
for  our  house  stood  at  the  extreme  end 
of  the  street  and  the  last  of  the  way- 
home  was  therefore  solitary.  I  remem- 
ber a  breathless  run  from  the  blacksmith 
shop,  past  the  length  of  our  lonely  or- 
chard until  the  carriage-house  came  in 
sight,  through  whose  wide-open  doors  I 
could  see  a  man  moving  about.  One  last 
panting  effort  brought  me  there,  and  after 
my  spirit  had  been  slightly  reassured  by 
conversation,  I  took  a  circuitous  route  to 
the  house  that  I  might  secure  as  much 
companionship  as  possible  on  the  way.  I 
stopped  at  the  stable  to  pat  an  old  horse 
who  stood  munching  in  his  stall,  and  again 
to  throw  a  handful  of  corn  into  the  poultry- 
yard.  The  big  turkey  gobbler  who  came 
greedily  forward  gave  me  great  comfort 
because  he  was  so  absurd  and  awkward 
that  no  one  could  possibly  associate  him 
with  anything  so  solemn  as  death,  I  went 
into  the  kitchen  where  the  presiding  genius 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         157 

allowed  me  to  come  without  protest  al- 
though the  family  dog  was  at  my  heels. 
I  felt  constrained  to  keep  my  arms  about 
his  shaggy  neck  while  trying  to  talk  of 
familiar  things  —  woiJd  the  cake  she  was 
making  be  baked  in  the  little  round  tins  or 
in  the  big  square  one  ?  But  although  these 
idle  words  were  on  my  lips,  I  wanted  to  cry 
out,  "Their  mother  is  dead;  whatever, 
whatever  will  the  children  do?"  These 
words,  which  I  had  overheard  as  we  came 
away  from  the  graveyard,  referred  doubtless 
to  the  immediate  future  of  the  little  family, 
but  :n  my  mind  were  translated  into  a  de- 
mand for  definite  actid  on  the  part  of 
the  children  against  this  horrible  thing 
which  had  befallen  their  mother. 

It  was  with  no  sense  of  surprise  that  I 
found  this  long-forgotten  experience  spread 
before  my  eyes  on  the  walls  of  a  tomb 
built  four  thousand  years  ago  into  a  sandy 
hill  above  the  Nile,  at  Assuan.  The  man 
so  long  dead,  who  had  prepared  the  tomb 
for  himself,  had  carefully  ignored  the  grim- 
ness  of  death.  He  is  portrayed  as  going 
about  his  affairs  surrounded  by  his  family, 


r^S     LONG    ROAD MOFT WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

his  friends,  and  his  servants  ;  grain  is  being 
measured  before  him  into  his  warehouse, 
while  a  scribe  by  his  side  registers  the 
amount ;  the  herdsmen  lead  forth  cattle 
for  his  inspection ;  two  of  them,  enra.^ed 
bulls,  paying  no  attention  to  the  sombre 
implication  of  tomb  decoration,  lower  their 
huge  headSj  threatening  each  other  as  if 
there  were  no  such  thing  as  death  in  the 
world.  Indeed,  the  builder  of  the  tomb 
seems  to  have  liked  the  company  of  ani- 
mals, perhaps  because  they  were  so  in- 
curious concerning  death.  His  dogs  are 
around  him,  he  stands  erect  in  a  boat  front 
which  he  spears  fish,  and  so  on  from  one 
marvelous  relief  to  another,  but  all  the 
time  your  heart  contracts  for  him,  and  you 
know  that  in  the  midst  of  this  elaborately 
prepared  nonchalance  he  is  miserably  ter- 
rified by  the  fate  which  may  be  in  store  for 
Mm'^-and  is  trying  to  make  himself  believe 
that  he  need  not  leave  all  this  wonted  and 
homely  activity ;  that  if  his  body  is  but 
properly  preserved  he  will  be  able  to  enjoy 
it  forever.  -f-^torr  ?}  '.R 
Although,  the  Egyptians,  in  their  natural 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY)        159 

desire  to  cling  to  the  familiar  during  the 
strange  experience  of  death,  portrayed  upon 
the  walls  of  their  tombs  many  domestic 
and  social  habits  whose  likeness  to  our  own 
household  life  gives  us  the  quick  satis- 
faction with  which  the  traveller  encounters 
the  familiar  and  wonted  in  a  strange  land, 
such  a  momentary  thrill  is  quite  unhke  the 
abiding  sense  of  kinship  which  is  founded 
upon  the  unexpected  similarity  of  ideas, 
and  it  is  the  latter  which  are  encountered 
in  the  tombs  of  the  eighteenth  century 
dynasty.  The  paintings  portray  a  great 
hall,  at  the  end  of  which  sits  Osiris,  the 
god  who  had  suffered  death  on  earth, 
awaiting  those  who  come:  before;  hira  for 
judgment.  In  the  center  of  the  hall  stands 
a  huge  balance  in  which  the  hearts  of  men 
are  weighed,  once  more  reminiscent  of  a 
childish  conception,  making  clear, that  as 
the  Egyptians  became  more;  anxious i.aiid 
scrupulous  they  gradually  made  the  des- 
tiny of  man  dependent  upon  morality,  and 
finally  directed  the  souls  of  men  to  he9.y^n 
or  hell  according  to  their  merits.  Nrr.-  ;;?r)a 
(KlThere; lis/.a ( thjeojry  that  the  tremendous 


i6o     LONG   ROAD   OF   WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

results  of  good  and  evil,  in  the  earliest 
awakening  to  them,  were  first  placed  in  the 
next  world  by  a  primitive  people  sore  per- 
plexed as  to  the  partialities  and  injustices 
of  mortal  life.  This  simple  view  is  doubt- 
less the  one  the  child  naturally  takes.  In 
Egypt  I  was  so  vividly  recalled  to  my  first 
apprehension  of  it,  that  the  contention  that 
the  very  belief  in  immortality  is  but  the 
postulate  of  the  idea  of  reward  and  retri- 
bution, seemed  to  me  at  the  moment  a 
perfectly  reasonable  one. 

(The  incident  of  my  childhood  around 
which  it  had  formulated  itself  was  very 
simple.  I  had  been  sent  with  a  message 
—  an  important  commission  it  seemed  to 
me  —  to  the  leader  of  the  church  choir 
that  the  hymn  selected  for  the  doctor's 
funeral  was  "How  blest  the  righteous 
when  he  dies."  The  village  street  was  so 
strangely  quiet  under  the  summer  sun  that 
even  the  little  particles  of  dust  beating  in 
the  hot  air  were  more  noiseless  than  ever 
before.  Frightened  by  the  noonday  still- 
ness and  instinctively  seeking  companion- 
ship,  I   hurried  toward  two  women  who 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         i6i 

were  standing  at  a  gate  talking  in  low  tones. 
In  their  absorption  they  paid  no  attention 
to  my  somewhat  wistful  greeting,  but  I 
heard  one  of  them  say  with  a  dubious 
shake  of  the  head  that  "he  had  never 
openly  professed  nor  joined  the  church," 
and  in  a  moment  I  understood  that  she 
thought  the  doctor  would  not  go  to  heaven. 
What  else  did  it  mean,  that  half-threaten- 
ing tone  ^  Of  course  the  doctor  was  good, 
as  good  as  any  one  could  be.  Only  a  few 
weeks  before  he  had  given  me  a  new  penny 
when  he  had  pulled  my  tooth,  and  once  I 
heard  him  drive  by  in  the  middle  of  the 
night  when  he  took  a  beautiful  baby  to 
the  miller's  house ;  he  went  to  the  farms 
miles  and  miles  away  when  people  were 
sick,  and  everybody  sent  for  him  the 
minute  they  were  in  trouble.  How  could 
any  one  be  better  than  that  ? 

In  defiant  contrast  to  the  whispering 
women,  there  arose  in  my  mind,  composed 
doubtless  of  various  Bible  illustrations,  the 
picture  of  an  imposing  white-robed  judge 
seated  upon  a  golden  throne,  who  listened 
gravely  to  all  those  good  deeds  as  they  were 


i62     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

read  by  the  recording  angel  from  his  great 
book,  and  then  sent  the  doctor  straight  to 
heaven. 

I  dimly  felt  the  challenge  of  the  fine  old 
hymn  in  its  claim  of  blessings  for  the 
righteous,  and  was  defiantly  ready  at  the 
moment  to  combat  the  theology  of  the 
entire  community.  Of  my  own  claim  to 
heaven  I  was  most  dubious,  and  I  simply 
could  not  bring  myself  to  contemplate  the 
day  when  my  black  sins  should  be  read 
aloud  from  the  big  book ;  but  when  the 
claim  of  reward  in  the  next  world  for  well- 
doing in  this,  came  to  me  in  regard  to  one 
whose  righteousness  was  undoubted,  I  was 
eager  to  champion  him  before  all  mankind 
and  even  before  the  judges  in  the  shadowy 
world  to  come. 

This  state  of  mind,  this  mood  of  trucu- 
lent discussion,  was  recalled  by  the  wall 
paintings  in  the  tomb  of  a  nobleman  in 
the  Theban  hills.  In  an  agonized  posture 
he  awaits  the  outcome  of  his  trial  before 
Osiris.  Thoth,  the  true  scribe,  records  on 
the  wall  the  just  balance  between  the  heart 
of  the  nobleman,  which  is  in  one   pan  of 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         163 

the  scale,  and  the  feather  of  truth  which  is 
in  the  other.  The  noble  appeals  to  his 
heart,  which  has  thus  been  separated  from 
him,  to  stand  by  him  during  the  weighing 
and  not  to  bear  testimony  against  him. 
"Oh,  heart  of  my  existence,  rise  not  up 
against  me ;  be  not  an  enemy  against  me 
before  the  divine  powers ;  thou  art  my  Ka 
that  is  in  my  body,  the  heart  that  came  to 
me  from  my  mother."  The  noble  even 
tries  a  bribe  by  reminding  the  Ka  that  his 
own  chance  of  survival  is  dependent  on  his 
testimony  at  this  moment.  The  entire  ef- 
fort on  the  part  of  the  man  being  tried  is 
to  still  the  voice  of  his  own  conscience,  to 
maintain  stoutly  his  innocence  even  to 
himself. 

The  attitude  of  the  self-justifying  noble 
might  easily  have  suggested  those  later 
childish  struggles  in  which  a  sense  of 
hidden  guilt,  of  repeated  failure  in  "being 
good,"  plays  so  large  a  part,  and  humbles 
a  child  to  the  very  dust.  That  the  defi- 
nite reminiscence  evoked  by  the  tomb 
belonged  to  an  earlier  period  of  rebellion 
may  indicate  that  the  Egyptian  had  not 


l64     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

yet  learned  to  commune  with  his  gods  for 
spiritual  refreshment. 

Whether  it  is  that  the  long  days  and 
magical  nights  on  the  Nile  lend  themselves 
to  a  revival  of  former  states  of  conscious- 
ness, or  that  I  had  come  to  expect  land- 
marks of  individual  development  in  Egypt, 
or,  more  likely  still,  that  I  had  fallen  into 
a  profoundly  reminiscent  mood,  I  am  un- 
able to  state ;  but  certainly,  as  the  Nile 
boat  approached  nearer  to  him  "who  sleeps 
in  Philae,"  something  of  the  Egyptian  feel- 
ing for  Osiris,  the  god  to  whom  was  attrib- 
uted the  romance  of  a  hero  and  the  char- 
acter of  a  benefactor  and  redeemer,  came 
to  me  through  long-forgotten  sensations. 
Typifying  the  annual  "great  affliction," 
Osiris,  who  had  submitted  himself  to  death, 
mutilation,  and  burial  in  the  earth,  re- 
turned each  Spring  when  the  wheat  and 
barley  sprouted,  bringing  not  only  a 
promise  of  bread  for  the  body  but  healing 
and  comfort  for  the  torn  mind ;  an  in- 
timation that  death  itself  is  beneficent  and 
may  be  calmly  accepted  as  a  necessary 
part  of  an  ordered  universe. 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         165 

Day  after  day,  seeing  the  rebirth  of  the 
newly  planted  fields  on  the  banks  of  the 
Nile,  and  touched  by  a  fresh  sense  of 
the  enduring  miracle  of  Spring  with  its 
inevitable  analogy  to  the  vicissitudes  of 
human  experience,  one  dimly  comprehends 
how  the  pathetic  legends  of  Osiris,  by  pro- 
viding the  Egyptian  with  an  example  for 
his  own  destiny,  not  only  opened  the  way 
for  a  new  meaning  in  life,  but  also  gradually 
vanquished  the  terrors  of  death. 

Again  there  came  a  faint  memory  of  a 
child's  first  apprehension  that  there  may 
be  poetry  out-of-doors,  of  the  discovery  that 
myths  have  a  foundation  in  natural  phe- 
nomena, and  at  last  a  more  definite  rem- 
iniscence. 

fl  saw  myself  a  child  of  twelve  standing 
stock-still  on  the  bank  of  a  broad-flowing 
river,  with  a  little  red  house  surrounded 
by  low-growing  willows  on  its  opposite 
bank,  striving  to  account  to  myself  for  a 
curious  sense  of  familiarity,  for  a  con- 
viction that  I  had  long  ago  known  it  all 
most  intimately,  although  I  had  certainly 
never   seen   the   Mississippi   River   before. 


l66     LONG    ROAD   OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

I  remember  that,  much  puzzled  and  mysti- 
fied, at  last  I  gravely  concluded  that  it  was 
one  of  those  intimations  of  immortality 
that  Wordsworth  had  written  about,  and 
I  went  back  to  my  cousin's  camp  in  so  ex- 
alted a  frame  of  mind  that  the  memory  of 
the  evening  light  shining  through  the  blades 
of  young  corn  growing  in  a  field  passed  on 
the  way  has  remained  with  me  for  more 
than  forty  years. 

Was  that  fugitive  sense  of  having  lived 
before  nearer  to  the  fresher  imaginations 
of  the  Egyptians,  as  it  is  nearer  to  the  mind 
of  a  child  ?  and  did  the  myth  of  Osiris 
make  them  more  willing  to  die  because  the 
myth  came  to  embody  a  confidence  in  this 
transitory  sensation  of  continuous  life  ? 

Such  ghosts  of  reminiscence,  coming  to 
the  individual  as  he  visits  one  after  an- 
other of  the  marvellous  human  documents 
on  the  banks  of  the  Nile,  may  be  merely 
manifestations  of  that  new  humanism  which 
is  perhaps  the  most  precious  possession  of 
this  generation,  the  belief  that  no  altar  at 
which  living  men  have  once  devoutly  wor- 
shipped, no  oracle  to  whom  a  nation  long 


INTERPRETATIVE    MEMORY         167 

ago  appealed  in  its  moments  of  dire  con- 
fusion, no  gentle  myth  in  which  former 
generations  have  found  solace,  can  lose 
all  significance  for  us,  the  survivors. 

Is  it  due  to  this  same  humanism  that, 
in  spite  of  the  overweight  of  the  tomb, 
Egypt  never  appears  to  the  traveller  as 
world-weary,  or  as  a  land  of  the  dead  ? 
Although  the  slender  fellaheen,  whom  he 
sees  all  day  pouring  the  water  of  the  Nile 
on  their  parched  fields,  use  the  primitive 
shaduf  of  their  remote  ancestors,  and  the 
stately  women  bear  upon  their  heads  water- 
jars  of  a  shape  unchanged  for  three  thou- 
sand years,  modern  Egypt  refuses  to  be- 
long to  the  past  and  continually  makes  the 
passionate  living  appeal  of  those  hard- 
pressed  in  the  struggle  for  bread. 

Under  the  smoking  roofs  of  the  primi- 
tive clay  houses  lifted  high  above  the  level 
of  the  fields,  because  resting  on  the  ruins 
of  villages  which  have  crumbled  there  from 
time  immemorial,  mothers  feed  their  chil- 
dren, clutched  by  the  old  fear  that  there  is 
not  enough  for  each  to  have  his  portion ; 
and  the  traveller  comes  to  realize  with  a 


i68     LONG    ROAD    OF    WOMAN'S    MEMORY 

pang  that  the  villages  are  built  upon  the 
bleak,  barren  places  quite  as  the  dead  are 
always  buried  in  the  desert  because  no  black 
earth  can  be  spared,  and  that  each  new 
harvest,  cut  with  sickles  of  a  curve  already 
ancient  when  Moses  was  born,  in  spite  of 
its  quick  ripening,  is  garnered  barely  in 
time  to  save  the  laborer  from  actual  star- 
vation. 

Certain  it  is  that  through  these  our  liv- 
ing brothers,  or  through  the  unexpected 
reactions  of  memory  to  racial  records,  the 
individual  detects  the  growth  within  of  an 
almost  mystical  sense  of  the  life  common 
to  all  the  centuries,  and  of  the  unceasing 
human  endeavor  to  penetrate  Into  the  un- 
seen world.  rThese  records  also  afford 
glimpses  into  a  past  so  vast  that  the  pres- 
ent generation  seems  to  float  upon  its  sur- 
face as  thin  as  a  sheet  of  light  which  mo- 
mentarily covers  the  ocean  and  moves  in 
response  to  the  black  waters  beneath  it.  ^ 


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change  in  the  outward  habits,  conduct,  points  of  view, 
and  ways  of  doing  things,  which  marks  the  present  age, 
Miss  Tarbell  maintains  that  certain  great  currents  of 
life  still  persist.  To  consider  that  these  are  lost  in  the 
new  world  of  machines  and  systems  is,  she  holds,  only 
to  study  the  surface.  The  relation  to  society  and  to 
the  future  of  the  old  and  common  pursuits  of  the 
woman  is  her  theme,  which  at  once  makes  the  volume 
appear  as  a  sort  of  supplement  to  her  previous  work, 
"The  Business  of  Being  a  Woman." 

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